


Confidential

by Roadie, ViviWrites



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: 1950s, Alternate Universe - 1950s, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Hollywood, Alternate Universe - No Powers, F/F, Jewish Alex Danvers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-11-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:27:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 42,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27064147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roadie/pseuds/Roadie, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ViviWrites/pseuds/ViviWrites
Summary: Was it only three months ago that the story had come out in Confidential magazine? It felt like so much more time had passed. The headline was burned into Alex’s memory:  ALEXIS D’ANVERS AND MAGGIE SAWYER: BOSOM BUDDIES OR BEDROOM BUDDIES?They met in 1952, they fell in love in 1953, they fell apart in 1954.Alex and Maggie are movie stars in the waning days of Hollywood's golden age. Against the backdrop of the House Un-American Activities Committee's anti-communist witch-hunts, the Hollywood blacklist, the rise of Technicolor cinema, the virulent early days of celebrity tabloids, and a (literally) underground gay bar, this is a story of how they find each other again in 1955.Words by Roadie, art by ViviWrites.
Relationships: Alex Danvers/Maggie Sawyer
Comments: 136
Kudos: 191
Collections: Sanvers Big Bang | 2020





	1. Part 1

**Author's Note:**

> Roadie says: I was inspired to write this after I finished reading "The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo" by Taylor Jenkins Reed -- a book I highly recommend. There's a cameo from two of the characters in that book (not the main ones) in Part 1.
> 
> I don't promise perfect historical accuracy here, but I've done my homework in the areas where I could. 
> 
> Some period-typical homophobia, racism, and sexism. There is one instance of homophobic violence but it happens to a secondary character off-screen and is never described in detail.
> 
> Keep an eye out for a flash-forward epilogue that I didn't get around to writing before the deadline!

It wasn’t rational, but still Alex hoped that Maggie would be there when she got home.

She’d hoped she’d be able to walk in the door and set her clutch on the table in the entryway. Her feet were killing her, so she’d bend to unbuckle her heels, and she’d hear Maggie’s footsteps padding across the cold, white tile. Alex would look up and Maggie would be standing like she’d so often stood before, in a silk robe with her long, platinum-blonde hair loose around her shoulders, regarding Alex with a wry, twisted smile. 

“How was it?” Maggie would ask.

“As awful as you’d expect,” Alex would reply. Then she’d purse her lips. “Help me forget?”

And then Maggie would offer her hands, and Alex would take them, and they’d stumble first to the shower, where Maggie would wash the remains of the day from Alex’s skin, and then they’d stumble into bed, where Maggie would erase even the memories of the people Alex had allowed to touch her.

Alex hoped that Maggie would be there when she got home--but it wasn’t a hope, not really. “Hope” implied something possible, but there was no possibility of Maggie meeting her at home tonight or any other night. This was a dream, or a fantasy, built from the dozens or hundreds of times that it had happened before: Alex would come home to Maggie, or Maggie to Alex, and one would distract the other from everything they’d had to say and do while they were apart. 

They met in 1952, they fell in love in 1953, they fell apart in 1954.

In all that time, they almost never walked in the door together. It wouldn’t do to be seen that way, after all. They arrived separately, they left separately, they took care not to spend too much time together when they were out. At one point, they had crafted the suggestion that they despised each other. That way, when the tabloids looked to tell stories about them, they found stories of enmity, of two women who hated each other so much they couldn’t be in the same room together. It helped keep anyone from noticing that they retreated to the same room together every night they could. 

They’d given up that schtick some time ago. They didn’t make a fuss of their reconciliation; just let themselves be photographed together at parties they’d both attended on the arms of different dates. The story grew from there, to the point that they became able to visit each other on set and spend time together in public without raising eyebrows 

And now, Alex came home to an empty house. 

It was late, but Alex wasn’t tired. Her skin crawled, prickling everywhere Max had touched her. His hand on her waist from where they’d danced, on her elbow from where he’d steered her to the bar to buy more cocktails, on her hip from where he’d settled his clammy fingers possessively when they’d run into Don and Ruby Adler.

Her skin prickled worse on her palms and her fingers, where she’d touched him on the shoulder and chest and drawn on all of her talents to make him believe she enjoyed it. Her cheeks hurt from twisting her face into a saccharine, over-eager smile and keeping it there all night, certain that if she let it drop, even for a moment, she’d never be able to screw it back into place again.

Acting for the screen came naturally to Alex. It was whimsical; even when she played sad or angry, she had fun.

But the acting she’d done tonight, hopping from the Frolic Room to the Mocambo to the Beverly Hills Hotel, parading for an audience of paparazzi and tabloid snitches eager to sell their stories to _Confidential_ and _The National Enquirer_ … that was the kind of acting that made her limbs feel leaden and her soul feel heavier still.

Max had tried to convince her to let him come home with her. “Come on,” he’d said, “it’ll be just the fix you need after those rumors about you and Maggie.”

“I don’t care about those rumors, Max,” she’d said. It was a lie, of course, but she’d spoken nothing but lies the whole evening. Lies after lies, but one truth came easily: “You’re not coming to bed with me.”

It was convenient that Max thought it beneath him to try to sleep with anyone who didn’t want to sleep with him. So when they left together in his car, he dropped her at her home before continuing on to his.

And now she was here, in her own marble-floored foyer with the cold seeping through her stockings. 

It had been weeks and weeks. She’d thought things would be starting to get easier.

They weren’t.

Alex thought of the dog that she and Maggie had joked about getting. How she wished they’d gotten one, now, or that she’d gotten one herself, to invite up onto that big bed with her. She imagined how her housekeeper would purse her lips at the dog hair on the bedspread, but she wouldn’t say anything, just like she’d never said anything when she and Maggie had clumsily tried to pretend they hadn’t spent the night in the same bed. 

But Alex couldn’t bear the thought of lying in that bed alone.

\--

Was it only three months ago that the story had come out in _Confidential_ magazine? It felt like so much more time had passed. The headline was burned into Alex’s memory: ALEXIS D’ANVERS AND MAGGIE SAWYER: BOSOM BUDDIES OR BEDROOM BUDDIES? 

Perhaps the greatest irony was that nothing tabloid-worthy had happened between them on the night _Confidential_ described.

They’d been at the same party. It was the kind of party that usually felt safe, hosted by a producer from Fox and filled to the brim with celebrities all sharing the mutual understanding that they could have a good time without having their drunken extramarital indiscretions or cocaine habits sold to the press. What Maggie and Alex were to each other was the kind of thing that scandalized only some people in Hollywood, not all, but it was polite to give everyone a degree of plausible deniability, so they were never intimate in public, and this party was no different.

Maggie had been sitting with Alex in the living room, and she left to get them more cocktails. It took longer than it should have; long enough for Alex to make her way toward the bar, and then, when Maggie wasn’t there, through to the sunroom, which was the only place she could have gone without Alex seeing her. 

Alex found Maggie there, cornered by a leering Ricky Malverne who towered drunkenly over her and made no pretense of the fact that he was looking down the front of her dress.

Maggie was fine. Maggie had grown up rough and tumble in Nebraska, a Mexican girl surrounded by white corn-fed boys who thought her only worth was the worth they gave her. She could outmanoeuvre and outrun and outpunch men twice her size, and given how drunk Ricky was, he posed no real threat.

But the safety of parties like this was safety for some over others: the safety of men to misbehave above the safety of women not to be misbehaved upon. And Maggie had an image to protect: the wholesome small-town American girl, aw-shucks and wide-eyed. That’s why the producers had given her the name “Maggie Sawyer”: because every man had, at some point, fallen in love with a neighbor girl named Maggie, and there was nothing more American than Tom Sawyer. “Margarita Rodas,” they said, was a name for the household help. 

Margarita Rodas wouldn’t have thought twice about shoving Ricky Malverne back and cementing the put-off with a swift kick to the family jewels.

Maggie Sawyer was too sweet, too demure, too bashful to do anything so coarse. 

And even here, at a “safe” party, Maggie had an image to protect. Maggie Sawyer was the woman producers and directors wanted to hire. None of them wanted anything to do with Margarita Rodas.

Alex’s story was the opposite. “Alexandra Danvers” was a name for the forgettable daughter of an office worker slogging away in middle management. “Alexis D’Anvers” was elusive and foreign in a glamorous way, aspirational for women to become and men to desire. 

It was Alexis D’Anvers, not Alexandra Danvers, who swept in gracefully to rescue Maggie. “There you are, Maggie darling! I’ve been looking all over for you. Come with me, Gary said he wants to talk. I think he’s got a part for you in that Roman epic he’s doing.” Then, almost as an afterthought, she said with just enough sincerity to avoid being explicitly rude, “Oh, hello, Ricky.”

Ricky turned his glassy eyes to Alex and grunted something that was, perhaps, supposed to be a greeting, and then turned back to Maggie.

Maggie looked at Alex with a kind of frantic relief. “I’ll talk to you later, Ricky, okay?” she said, and then slipped out from between him and the wall and stepped quickly over to Alex.

He just blinked, wobbling on his feet as he turned to watch her go.

They were almost out of the room when he slurred, “You could never do better than me, Sawyer. Even with the blonde hair, you’re too brown up close.”

Alex had tensed, prepared to wheel on him, but Maggie had tightened her grip on Alex’s arm. “Don’t,” she said, sharp in a way she wasn't usually.  
  
So Alex swallowed her anger and said nothing.

Maggie was shaken, her breath coming in deepening shudders, so Alex had led her up the stairs and found an empty bedroom. Sure enough, as soon as the door closed, Maggie broke down.

They sat on the edge of the bed and Alex held Maggie close while she cried, pressing kisses to the top of her head and doing her best to make soothing sounds. 

“I’m sorry,” Maggie said, when her breathing settled. 

“Don’t you dare be sorry,” Alex replied. She brushed Maggie’s tears from her cheeks. “He’s a pig. And he’s scary.”

“I’ve dealt with that kind of thing my whole life,” Maggie said. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand, and Alex wanted to hold her and never let her go. “People threatening me, or insulting me. I used to think, you know, if I could just get away from Nebraska, if I could make it to Hollywood, it would change. But it’s just as bad here. Worse, in some ways, because people try so hard to pretend like it’s better.”

Alex wanted to say that it shouldn’t be an insult to be called “brown.” That she loved Maggie’s olive skin as much as she loved her eyes and her dimples and her warm, perfect smile.

But that wasn’t the point, Alex knew. The point was that Ricky had meant it as an insult. That he’d intended to diminish her into thinking that only he could lift her up. The point was that Ricky, like so many other men, had felt entitled to Maggie’s body, to her space, to her safety.

Every woman had, at some time, felt some version of the way Maggie felt. Every woman broke down over it from time to time.

The timing of this particular breakdown wasn’t ideal, but these things were never fully within anyone’s control.

Maggie’s eyes were swollen. Her mascara had run down her cheeks. 

“How bad is it?” she asked. 

Alex winced and ran a thumb under Maggie’s eye, but all that accomplished was to spread the black smear. “Not great,” she said.

Maggie stood and went to look at the mirror that hung over a dresser on the opposite wall. “God,” she said, “I can’t let anyone see me like this.”

Even at parties like this, “safe” parties, it wouldn’t do for the actresses to look anything less than perfect to the men responsible for casting and hiring them.

Alex opened her purse and pulled out a handkerchief. She offered it to Maggie, who took it and moistened it with her tongue and then used it to dab at her cheeks. It helped the smeared makeup a bit, but there was nothing to be done about her red, swollen eyes. Alex had powder in her purse, but it matched Alex's skin tone, not Maggie's; it would make Maggie look like a grease-painted clown. And Maggie never carried more than a lipstick.

“Let’s just stay here awhile,” Alex said. “You’ve wiped away the worst of the mascara, and a little time will fix the rest.”

“Are you sure?” Maggie asked. “I know you wanted to talk to Frank about that opportunity at Paramount--”

“I’m sure,” Alex said. “I can talk to Jonn about Paramount and Frank tomorrow.” She stood and walked to the bookshelf at the far side of the bed. It was stocked with dime-store paperbacks and pulp novels and a few mysteries. Alex pulled an Agatha Christie she hadn’t read before. 

“Come on,” she said, “make yourself comfortable. I’ll read to you.”

Maggie stretched out atop the bedspread, careful to keep her skirt from bunching up, with her head on the pillow. Alex sat beside her, leaning against the headboard with the bedside lamp turned on. And for the next two hours, that’s where they stayed, as Alex read aloud from the pages of _Evil Under the Sun_.

By the time they left, the party had thinned a little, and nobody was paying attention to them. Alex had hired a car and driver to go to the party, but Maggie had driven herself, so they left together in Maggie’s car and went together to Maggie’s house in Burbank. The evening had been gruelling, and they were too tired to make love, so they undressed and just held each other under the blankets.

And then, ten days later, they were a headline in _Confidential_ magazine.

It felt so unfair, Alex thought. There were so many moments that the tabloids could have captured if they’d wanted to tell a story both scandalous and true. There was the time at dusk in a studio backlot, when Maggie had confided her secret in Alex, and Alex had responded by kissing her. Maggie had pushed Alex away and stormed off, and it wasn’t until weeks later that Alex came to understand that Maggie had thought Alex was working her for blackmail or for leverage in case she ever got hauled in front of HUAC. Maggie was terrified of being blacklisted and losing everything she’d achieved in fifteen years of work.

There was the time when, after weeks of unreturned phone calls and careful avoidance on the studio lots, Alex had driven through an unlikely LA downpour and pounded on Maggie’s front door until she was sopping wet and Maggie had no choice but to let her in. It would have made an epic photograph for the pages of _Hush Hush_ : Alexis D’Anvers, drowned rat, huddled against Maggie Sawyer’s front door and pleading to be let in. They’d talked long into the night, Alex wearing Maggie’s too-short pajama pants and a terry-cloth robe, about Alex’s feelings and Maggie’s fears. That was the night that Alex had begun to slowly, gently earn her way inside Maggie’s defences.

To this day, Alex is sure it was the rain that saved them, the rain that kept the paparazzi home that night.

They’d taken a holiday together, once, to Cabo San Lucas. They had, on occasion, spent days and days at a stretch at each other’s houses. Alex would play the game and go on dates with men from time to time, but Maggie almost never did.

(There was a stretch where she agreed to be seen out with Winslow Schott, a handsome young heartthrob on the rolls at Warner Brothers; a questionable choice when Maggie was so far above his status in Hollywood. Only Alex knew that she went out with him because he was like they were, so they were good for each other).

There were so many true stories the tabloids could have told, but they told the lie instead.

Alex never found out who had ratted them out.

\--

Alex and Maggie found out about the _Confidential_ story two days before it went to print. They were together in Alex’s living room, tidying up after a lunch eaten at the sofa, when the phone rang. It was Jonn, Alex’s agent, and he sounded grim. 

“Is Maggie with you?” he’d asked.

“Yes, she’s here,” Alex said, just as Maggie re-emerged from the kitchen. It had been a lovely Fall morning, lazy and indulgent since Alex was between films and Maggie wasn’t needed on set until the next day. Maggie was wearing tailored slacks--slacks!--and a scarf tied like an ascot, and she looked boyish and strong in a way that her publicist would have hated but that Alex absolutely adored. 

(That was why Maggie only dressed that way when they were home together.)

“You’d better sit down,” Jonn said. 

Alex’s face must have fallen, because Maggie’s face fell. Alex held out her hand and Maggie stepped forward to take it, and they sat down together on the sofa, their knees touching.

“There’s a story coming out about you in a couple of days,” Jonn said.

“About me?” Alex asked.

“About the two of you,” Jonn said.

Alex’s heart stopped. Her fingers tightened around Maggie’s, and Maggie’s brow furrowed in worry and confusion.

“Who’s running it?” Alex asked.

“ _Confidential_.”

Maggie scooted forward and lifted a hand to touch Alex on the cheek, but Alex shrugged her off and slid back, away, as though changing their behavior now might reverse the damage already done.

“Is there anything we can do?” she asked, but she knew the answer. The issue would be released in two days, which meant it had already gone to print.

“No. My source said they deliberated whether to run it or whether to hold off to try to land something more salacious. He said he didn’t know what the decision was until after the issue had been sent to the printer’s.”

A foot away on the sofa, Maggie was clutching her own hands, worried and confused, clearly trying to intuit the source of the panic by reading the furrow of Alex’s brow and the tension of her shoulders.

“What do we do?” Alex asked. 

“I need to make a few calls, but then I’ll come to you to discuss our options. Are you free at 4:00?”

“Yes,” Alex said, “of course.”

“All right. Have Maggie call Sam, too. Maybe the four of us should talk together.”

They hung up, and Alex turned to Maggie, who was staring wide-eyed at her.

“It’s happened, hasn’t it,” Maggie said.

It wasn’t really a question.

Alex licked her lips. “It has.”

They met that afternoon with Jonn and with Maggie’s publicist, a young woman named Samantha. Maggie had been hurt, at first, that the firm had handed her over to someone entry-level, but they’d become friendly with time. Sam and Jonn both knew what Alex and Maggie were to each other, and if it bothered them, they never let it show.

Alex and Maggie sat side-by-side on the sofa, and Sam and Jonn took the armchairs opposite them.

“What do we do?” Alex asked.

“I think it’s a bad idea to do anything too drastic right away,” Sam said. “It’ll just validate the story if it looks like we’re panicking.”

“I agree,” Jonn said, “but I think you need to plan to stay away from each other’s houses for awhile. There will be photographers planted outside both of your places after this for at least a few weeks.”

Sam nodded her agreement.

“But if we can’t meet at each other’s houses, where can we meet?” Maggie said. “We’ve always been careful about being seen out together.”

Alex slid her hand across the couch cushions until their fingers brushed.

“You can be seen out together,” Sam said. “You’re friends, you’ve always been friends, and you’re not going to let a cheap tabloid story change that. But you have to be careful.”

“This all feels so backward,” Alex said.

“Well, and, about that,” Samantha said, smoothing her hands nervously over her knees, “we’re going to need to get you out on some dates in the next few weeks.”

Dates with men, of course; a parade of Hollywood’s eligible bachelors.

“Okay,” Alex said, just as Maggie said “No.”

They looked at each other. Maggie looked shocked; Alex imagined that she must look shocked, too.

“How long will this have to last?” Alex asked.

Jonn sighed. “As long as it takes.”

That night, Alex and Maggie fought. 

“No, I don’t want to!” Maggie had exclaimed. “I don’t want to be seen hanging off the arm of some _man_ just so the tabloids can have something more palatable to speculate about. I don’t want to have to see pictures of _you_ hanging off of some man just so the tabloids can start counting the days until you start popping out babies.”

“It’s all acting,” Alex said, louder than necessary. In the moment, she thought she was angry, but later, with the perspective of hindsight, she’d realize that what she’d been feeling was fear. “It’s just acting, Maggie, isn’t that what we do?”

“It’s what we do on set! I don’t want to do it every day of my life.”

“We don’t just do it on set, Maggie, we do it for a living. If we want to keep making that living, we have to act a little in real life, too.” 

“To hell with that,” Maggie spat. “Real life doesn’t pay my telephone bill.”

They went to bed still furious, but Maggie stayed with Alex instead of going back to Burbank. Alex faced Maggie’s back, not touching her, and stared into the darkness until her eyes adjusted, and then she watched the way the moonlight through the curtain made Maggie’s hair glow a soft, ethereal silver, glistening like fairy dust.

As her heart settled, quieting from the adrenaline of their clash, Alex stared at the gleam of Maggie’s hair and wondered why they had let themselves argue over this. The fight wasn’t between them: they stood on the same side, opposite the tabloids and the gossip-hounds and a world that didn’t understand them. She felt a coldness in her gut, a tightness that was somewhere between terror and rage and nausea.  
  
Maggie’s breath hadn’t yet evened into sleep. There was a tension in her spine that Alex could feel even now, even in this darkness across a few inches of mattress, because she felt that tension in her own spine, too.

Slowly, she slid her hand across the sheet between them and rested it on the curve of Maggie’s hip, over the satin of her nightgown, and Maggie’s hand immediately covered it, her palm warm and insistent. It was an invitation. Alex drew herself across the space between them, her hand sliding to wrap around Maggie’s belly now, and folded their bodies together, knees and hips and shoulders nestled like spoons. Maggie shifted her head a little to make space on her pillow, and Alex buried her nose in that shimmering hair, smelling shampoo and, past that, Maggie’s skin.

Their bodies softened into each other. Alex had one arm pinned between them, the other wrapped tightly around Maggie’s stomach, but she resisted the urge to cling with the desperation she felt. Maggie’s hand rested on hers, her thumb brushing the back of her wrist.

“You know I love you more than anything,” Alex said, so quietly she might have been speaking to herself.

Maggie’s arms shifted, folding over Alex’s arm and holding it as tightly as Alex held all of Maggie.

“I know,” Maggie whispered back. She lifted Alex’s hand to her lips, and then settled it back against her stomach. 

“I didn’t know I could love someone like this, until you.” 

Maggie’s body shuddered a little, a small hiccup of breath. “I know,” she said again. 

“We’re going to figure this out,” Alex said.

Maggie sank back deeper into Alex, every curve of flesh and skin fitting into the hollows of Alex’s body, and Alex wished they hadn’t worn their nightclothes, that she could feel all of Maggie’s skin like this, merged, not sexually, but like they were of a single body, a part of each other.

Maggie kissed Alex’s knuckles again, and then tucked Alex’s hand into the hollow between her breasts, holding it there with both of her arms.  
  
“I love you too,” she said.

The night was long, and Alex slipped in and out of light sleep, nuzzled into the back of Maggie’s neck.

She was fairly certain Maggie didn’t sleep much, either.

\--

Alex slept late, and wrapped herself in her robe to go and start making coffee. This was unusual. Her mother had always told her that a lady should bathe, dress, and do her makeup before sitting down to breakfast, especially when there was someone else in the house. And there was; Alex could hear Edith humming to herself down the hall while she did the laundry.  
  
But her mother never had to endure a night on the arm of Maxwell Lord. Nor, Alex imagined, a hangover. It felt undeserved: she hadn’t been drunk the night before, really. She’d spaced out her cocktails with hors d’oeuvres and never felt more than a buzz. But here she was, dull-witted and cotton-mouthed and craving coffee in her pajamas like an addict at--she glanced at the clock over the counter--just past eleven-thirty in the morning. 

Edith had seen her pyjamas a hundred times before, anyway.

Alex was halfway through her second slice of toast when the phone rang. She thanked a God she didn’t believe in that she didn’t have the kind of hangover that came with a headache, and let it ring for as long as it took to finish chewing and swallowing her bite and then to chase it with her last swig of coffee.

The phone was mounted to the wall near the fridge. She walked there and picked up the handset. “Hello, Alexis D’Anvers speaking.”

“Alex, hi.” 

It was Jonn. He sounded excited, like he had news. A script, maybe? A new studio contact?

“I heard you had a good night last night,” he said.

Alex closed her eyes. She leaned over and braced her shoulder against the doorframe. “I guess that means I did my job well.”

“You did, Alex, you did! I have great news. I’ve been tipped off that the next issue of _The Lowdown_ is going to have a picture of you and Max necking in his car last night near Café La Bohême.”

Alex and Max had not necked in his car. Not last night, not any night, not ever. They had sat in his car and argued for a minute about where he was driving her and whether they’d be going there together. She was adamant: he would drive her home, and she would be going there alone.

Honestly, Alex had no idea how anyone could possibly have mistaken their arguing for kissing. It hadn’t been a violent conversation, no flailing hands or shouting, but they had remained squarely in their own seats, Max’s hands resting on the steering wheel and parking brake and Alex’s hands resting in her lap.

But then--there had been one moment.

Max had been holding his car keys in his far hand, and Alex had reached across, lunging over his body to grab them and force them into the ignition herself. Max hadn’t fought; he had laughed at her, patronizing ass that he was, and snatched the keys back to start the car himself.

Nothing more intimate had happened. 

But a well-timed photographer might have caught a picture that would have sold the lie.

“Have you told Sam yet?” Alex asked. God, she was tired. She tried to remember if she’d finished the coffee in the percolator or whether there remained enough for another cup.

Jonn’s voice softened. “Not yet.”

“Okay. Just… can you give me a day or two to tell Maggie first? I’d like her to hear it from me.” 

“Of course,” Jonn said, without hesitation. “The magazine will be on newsstands a week from tomorrow, so you have a little time.”

“Thank you.”

They sat in silence for a long moment, neither with anything to say but neither wanting to hang up on Alex’s obvious sadness. Alex could hear a creak, the sound of Jonn shifting in his seat.

“Alex,” he said, and his voice was softer still. Paternal. “I said you had to be careful to be more discreet and a little more distant for awhile. Not that you had to give her up.”

 _Give her up_ , like she was an addiction. _Give her up_ , as though Maggie were something Alex could ever quit.

“I didn’t give her up.”

Jonn sighed. When he spoke, his voice sounded heavy, as though he were tired of carrying it. “Listen. Do you need anything? I can have groceries delivered, or dinner from that place you like in Chinatown. Or I can drop by later for a visit. I just bought that new record from The Platters, we could give it a listen.”

“No, no. I’m fine. Thank you, Jonn.”

After another moment’s pause, Jonn said, “This is a good thing, Alex. I know it’s awful, but for you, for your career, it’s a good thing.”

Alex nodded like that might help her convince herself that this was true. “I know.”

After they hung up, Alex went back to the percolator. It was empty. With shaking hands, she cleared out the basket and began to make herself another pot.

\--

Alex had been seeing Max for a few weeks. They’d wrapped a film together in the summer that was scheduled for release in December, a schlocky Christmas flick in glowing, modern Technicolor about a scrooge-like business tycoon who discovers the meaning of Christmas thanks to the interference of his good-hearted, impoverished secretary, with whom he eventually falls in love. The hole in the premise, Alex thought, was that if the secretary was impoverished, it was the tycoon’s fault, because he was the one paying her. But the image of the benevolent executive and the kind-hearted secretary would play well in the current political climate. Nothing communist about it.

She dated Max because their publicists set them up. It would be good for the film, of course, for the public to think its stars were truly in love. But it would have benefits to each of them individually, too. Max was known for being the type to gallivant around with a new woman in a new car every week; he seemed to be fuelled by little more than the power of his own ego. It made him a poor fit for a feel-good holiday film, so he could use the makeover.

And Alex?  
  
Well. 

The benefit was obvious.

Paparazzi snapped photos of them leaving restaurants and arriving at lounges. Apparently there was something newsworthy about the act of Alex exiting a car door that Max held open for her. 

“I hate this,” she said to Jonn, after their second date when she and Max encountered their first photographers. “I can’t stand him. I hate all of it.”

They sat in his office, he in his leather desk chair, and she opposite him.

“I know,” Jonn said, his voice soft, eyes kind. He walked around the desk to sit beside her. “I know. But this means it’s working. Keep it up just a little longer. The tabloids will publish something soon, and not long after that they’ll get bored with you, and then you’ll have no more need of him.”  
  
Just a little longer. Alex breathed. It was acting. She could go out with him for just a little longer.

So she’d gone out with him for awhile longer. Another week, and another after that, with paparazzi all over the place and yet no stories to come from the photos. Until, finally, someone managed to snap a photo good enough to come up with a story to match it.

This, it seemed, was the trend of Alex’s life of late: fodder for fabricated scandals.

But at least this was the beginning, she thought.

The beginning meant she was that much closer to the end of it.

\--

She called Maggie later that day, once she’d showered and dressed and done her hair and taken an aspirin for the headache that was beginning to set in. She didn’t want to put it off any longer than she had to, but she wanted to be put together for Maggie. Even on the phone, even when Maggie couldn’t see her, she wanted to speak to Maggie wearing the face of someone Maggie might respect under other circumstances. 

Edith had cleaned up the kitchen, so Alex stood there, in the same spot where she’d stood to talk to Jonn in the morning, and dialled Maggie’s number. 

Maggie answered on the third ring. “Hello?”  
  
Alex’s knees went soft. She gripped the doorframe, trying to steady herself before they gave out under her.

God, Maggie’s voice. 

Her voice.

“Hello?” Maggie repeated.

“Hi,” Alex said. 

There was a long, drawn-out silence.

“Alex,” Maggie said, eventually.

Alex nodded. “Yeah.”

She sounded so close. As though she should be able to see Alex’s nod. As though Alex should be able to touch her, just now, by reaching out a hand.

They were quiet. Alex listened to Maggie’s breaths on the other end of the line.

“What do you need, Alex?” Maggie finally asked. She sounded exasperated.

Alex couldn’t blame her.

She swallowed hard, willing her racing heart to slow down. “There’s going to be a story in the next issue of _The Lowdown_."

“Okay.” Maggie would be nodding, now, her lip caught in her teeth; Alex could picture it perfectly. “Not about us, surely?”

“Not about us,” Alex confirmed. She tried to keep her voice steady. “About--about Max. And me.”

There was a rushing sound, like static on the receiver; an exhale of breath.

“Okay,” Maggie said. 

“It’s not true,” Alex rushed to add. “The story’s going to say that--that we did things we didn’t do. They might have a picture taken from a convenient angle. But nothing actually happened.”

Silence, again. 

A long, drawn-out silence.

“Okay,” Maggie said, finally.

Alex’s eyes began to well up. She rested her forehead against the trim of the doorframe and pinched the bridge of her nose. Why had she bothered to do her makeup before this call? She would only ruin it.

“I just wanted you to hear it from me,” Alex said. Her voice shook. She couldn’t help it.

On the other end of the line, there was a hitching sound, a shuddering breath: the only indication that Maggie was struggling through this, too.

“Thank you,” Maggie said.

And then silence again. Alex’s eyes were welling over; she could feel her throat filling, her nose running. 

She said, “It’s good to hear your voice.”

“Yeah,” Maggie said, “you too.” A sniff, a thick swallowing sound. “Goodbye, Alex.”

“...Goodbye.”

Alex set the receiver in its cradle and slid down to the floor, resting her forehead in her arms. 

She didn’t cry. She didn’t do anything. She felt numb.

She didn’t look up again until the shadows outside her kitchen window stretched long across her yard.

\--

The night before the _Confidential_ article came out, they each slept at their own homes. They didn’t stay together the night after, either. They couldn’t even talk to each other on the phone, even though all Alex wanted was to hear Maggie’s voice and remember that no matter how terrible this was, at least they were going through this together. 

But they weren’t going through it together. How could they, when Alex’s phone kept ringing with calls from journalists even after she’d asked the operator not to let any through? After the first three, Alex stopped answering; when she grew tired of the ringing, she took the phone off the hook. Outside, reporters and photographers had gathered, hoping for evidence of something sordid. Alex thought of the mezuzah that hung, inconspicuous, at the edge of the doorframe, and wished it would offer protection against these particular demons, but they kept knocking and the phone kept ringing. She tried to distract herself with a novel, and then gave up on that and just lay on her sofa, staring at the ceiling. At some point during the day, the police came through and moved the reporters out; Alex imagined Jonn must have called them. 

Alex lay there, staring at the ceiling, well into the afternoon, wondering how Maggie was doing. Wishing that they could be together, going through this. 

There had been quiet for some time when there was another knock on the door. 

_The journalists must be back_ , she thought, and ignored it.

The knocking continued after a pause, and then again after another. And then:

“Alex! Alex, it’s me!”  
  
Alex closed her eyes.

Kara.

“Come on, Alex! I have potstickers!”

Alex sighed.

She couldn’t keep herself from Kara.

Her back cracked as she stood; she stretched it out. Then she went to the door, and hid carefully behind it as she opened it for her sister to step in.

“Alex!” Kara said, once the door was closed. She looked perfectly put-together, as usual; a skirt-suit with her hair up perfectly, like she’d just come from CatCo and her job there as a secretary. “I’ve been trying to call you for hours, but I couldn’t get through.”

“I took my phone off the hook,” Alex said. 

“I thought so, that’s why I came. My God, Alex, how on Earth can they get away with saying that about you? That you and Maggie are...like that? You should sue!”

Kara, Alex knew, had a particular indignation for tabloids and the scuttlebutt they published, not only because she was the only member of the Danvers family not to have pursued a Hollywood career, but because she aspired to be a journalist and was infuriated by anything that published material that wasn’t fact-checked.

Alex’s shoulders sagged. “I’m not going to sue.”

“Why not? It’s libel!”

It was a question Alex couldn’t answer. Kara knew, after all, that if Alex sued for libel, it would fall to Alex to prove that the statement _Confidential_ had made wasn’t true, and that it was not possible to prove a negative.

Doubly impossible, in this case, because the story was not libelous. Because it was true.

Instead of responding, Alex led them to the kitchen and began to set out a table. There would be potstickers in that bag Kara was carrying, but there would be rice, too, and maybe some chop suey with noodles.

“I just wanted to see if you were all right,” Kara said, as she served herself. “I know Maggie’s a good friend to you, and this kind of thing can be hard on a friendship.” She brightened. “I know! Cat would just _die_ to do a profile on you for the magazine! What do you think? _Catco_ is reputable, Alex, and you can show everyone that you’re, you know, not like that. That you’re _normal_.” 

Something broken in Alex’s chest broke, yet again.

“Maybe,” she said, in a tone that she hoped implied _no_.

Kara took the hint. They talked about little things, unimportant things. Kara’s job. A contract that Alex was likely to sign for a major Paramount melodrama shooting in the spring.

“If you don’t mind, Kara, I think I’m going to go to bed,” she said, after. “It’s been such a tiring day.”

“Okay,” Kara replied. Together, they put the packaging in the trash and left their dishes in the sink for Edith to wash in the morning. 

“You can come and stay with me, if you want,” Kara said. “If you’re getting hounded here.”

But Alex just wanted to be home, in the bed she had so often shared with Maggie.

“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll let you know.”  
  
And then Kara went to the car, and Alex was alone again. 

She went to the kitchen and put the phone back in the cradle. For a long moment she stood there, staring at it, waiting to see if it would ring.

Then she went to the bedroom. She picked up the receiver on the phone there, and she dialled Maggie’s number.

It was busy.

She undressed and took her makeup off -- makeup that only Kara had seen that day -- and then tried the call again. The line was still busy. Maggie had probably taken the phone off the hook like Alex had done. 

It was a lonely night, clutching a pillow and trying to pretend it was slimmer and warmer and firmer than it was.

The next day passed much the same, with a visit from Jonn instead of Kara. Photographers had gathered outside the house again, and he shooed them away with threats of lawsuits, But at night, Alex was still alone.

Throughout the day, she tried to call Maggie. She knew she wasn’t likely to get through; between the calls, Alex herself kept the phone off the hook. 

But then, late in the evening, Alex called, and Maggie’s phone rang instead of giving her a busy signal. Alex waited, and waited and waited, with bated breath--

“Hello?”

Alex was sitting on the edge of her bed; she clutched the phone with both hands as if it would keep Maggie on the line. “Maggie, it’s me.”

On the other end of the line, Maggie let out a long, low breath. “My God, Alex, I’m so happy to hear your voice.”

“Me too. How are you?”

“They’ve been parked outside my house. Calling me for days. Same for you?”

“Yeah.” Alex swallowed. “I miss you.”

“What if we went away for a few days?” Maggie asked. “Down to Mexico or something. Nobody would care down there.”

Alex’s heart raced. She thought, at first, that it was desire, but desire didn’t carry this faint edge of panic. No: it was fear.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said. 

Maggie sighed. “You’re probably right. Wishful thinking, I guess.”

They sat quietly for a moment. Alex listened to the sound of Maggie’s breath.

“When can I see you?” Maggie asked. 

Alex inhaled. Her window was open; outside, she heard the call of an owl. It sounded strange, though; just a little thinner than a barred owl usually sounded. A mockingbird, probably. 

A car backfired on the road up the canyon. 

“I don’t know,” she said.

She heard Maggie breathe. This time, it shook, and the sound made Alex want to cry. 

Alex desperately wanted to be with Maggie. To hold her, to kiss her. To hide with her from all of this.

And yet the idea of seeing Maggie, of being seen with Maggie, was terrifying.

“Okay,” Maggie said. “We’ll just play it by ear.”

“I think that’s what we have to do,” Alex said.

Maggie swallowed. Alex could hear the lump in her throat.

“Goodnight, Alex,” Maggie said. “I love you.”

“Goodnight,” Alex replied. She wanted to say the rest of it, too. God knew she felt it. But there was a part of her that was afraid, even here, even now, as though someone might hear.

She set the receiver in the cradle without saying anything more.

They didn’t see each other for three days, four. For a week. Ten days. They spoke on the phone most evenings, and Alex listened to Maggie’s tone shift from sad to frustrated to angry as Alex continued to refuse to see her.

After two weeks, Maggie snapped, “I thought we’d decided to get through this together.”

“We are, Mags,” Alex said, “That’s exactly what we’re doing.”

“Is it? Because I feel completely alone.”

Alex hadn’t known what to say. She felt alone, too, but the alternative to alone wasn’t “together,” the alternative to alone was “paranoid and scared.”

Two days after that, Maggie became insistent.

“When, Alex?” she asked. “Give me a date.”

But Alex couldn’t.

The day after that, Maggie stopped answering Alex’s phone calls.

Two days later, Alex received, in the mail, a large box with a typewritten label and no return address.

When Alex opened it, she fell to her knees, her breath coming in shallow gasps, her heart clenching in physical, body-shaking pain.

It didn’t contain a letter, or even a note.

It contained every one of the things she’d left at Maggie’s house.

Alex hadn’t sobbed so hard since her father had died. 

\--

There were things Alex had learned from her father.

In her parents’ bedroom, there was an old fireplace, sealed up when the radiators had been installed. On that fireplace’s mantel sat a box, in ornate wood with a glass top, perhaps the size of a record player.

In that box lived the tallit he had worn on his Bar Mitzvah, and that he wore for occasional services and high holidays. There was the yarmulke he’d worn at his Bar Mitzvah, and the one he’d worn at his wedding, and one he’d worn at each of his parents’ funerals. His tefillin were there, too. 

When he’d been a child, he said, he’d worn a yarmulke every day, but he’d stopped in high school. She had only ever seen him wrap tefillin a handful of times, and all in the year of mourning after his parents had died, just a few months apart from each other. 

Her mother’s candlesticks, silver heirlooms that her grandmother had smuggled out of Russia in a false-bottomed suitcase, sat on the buffet in their dining room, where guests might easily mistake them for regular decorations on any evening but a Friday.

“It’s easier, in this world, to just be like everybody else,” her father had said, when, as a young child, she’d asked him about the box. “People like you when you don’t strike them as different, so they’re more willing to work with you. Sometimes, that’s just what you have to do. And there’s no shame in it. But here’s the secret.” He tapped the middle of her chest, over her heart. “In here, you know who you are. In here, you always know.”

He had been a successful screenwriter in the early days of the talkies; he’d been the one to discover Dalton Trumbo and mentor him into far greater success than he, himself, had ever earned. But his name had been respected, and Alex’s career had been built on the back of that good name.

After he’d died--suddenly, of leukemia--she’d inherited that box from his bedroom mantel. She kept it in her own bedroom, on top of her dresser.

The night after Maggie returned all of her things, Alex opened that box and draped herself in her father’s tallit. In the mirror, she looked strange; it felt masculine, like she was cross dressing.

But she wore it and curled up in bed, missing Maggie desperately, and feeling her father with her so she would not be alone.

\--

The story about Alex and Max came out in _The Lowdown_ . The phone, which had stopped ringing a week after the _Confidential_ story, began ringing again. She answered those calls and told the reporters to please speak to the publicity department at the Jones Talent Group. 

The fact that she was dignifying them with any kind of a response was all the response they needed. Which, Alex knew, was the point.

She went with Max to the premiere of Elizabeth Taylor’s newest film the following weekend, and the photographers went mad at the sight of the two of them. Max stood with his chin high and his arm tugging her so tightly into his side that she had no choice but to lean on him for balance.

She felt like a high-value accessory. Like one of his Bentleys. 

It was too much. The bulk of him, the weight of his presence. It was suffocating her.

That night, after the premiere, she told Max she didn’t feel well enough to go to the afterparty. He rolled his eyes, like he’d expected it, and then had someone at the theatre office call a car service to take her home. 

(She hoped he’d find himself some other girl at the party.)

At home, she changed out of her gown and into a more conservative tea dress. She couldn’t do much about her hair, given the hour and the amount of hairspray in it, but she took off the elaborate diamonds and put on some simple pearl earrings. 

In the mirror, she looked respectable. Classic. Forgettable in the way she wanted to be forgettable, at least for now.

Ten minutes later, she was in a taxi heading east.

She had the taxi driver drop her off on Rodeo Drive, where she flagged down another taxi to take her to Sunset Boulevard near downtown LA. From there, she got another cab and asked the driver to take her to an address on Central Avenue.

“I’ll take you there, but we have to go the long way around,” the driver said. “I won’t drive through Skid Row at this hour.”

“That’s fine,” Alex said.

They drove in silence, through the light from the streetlamps and the dark between them, flickering like the frames of film through an old projector.

She asked the cabbie to drop her off at the corner of Central and 42nd.

He pulled over and looked at her in his rearview, incredulous.  
  
“D’you have someone meeting you, ma’am?” he asked. “This isn’t a great neighbourhood anymore, the way things are changing.”

Alex looked out the window. There were clusters of people gathered outside various venues, places she knew were mostly jazz clubs; they were laughing and smoking and not paying her a single bit of attention. They were Black, every one of them, and she knew that that was why the cab driver was worried.

It was the perfect cover. The driver probably assumed she was secretly visiting the jazz clubs. It would have aligned with her public persona; there had been tabloid stories and whisper campaigns about her when she’d hired Jonn to be her agent. She didn’t mind that. She didn’t have the courage to be political in public, not like Sinatra, and her decision to hire Jonn hadn’t been a political one: he’d been friends with her father, she’d known him for most of her life, and she trusted him implicitly. But she believed in the changes that were coming. And she wasn’t worried about the crowds outside of the jazz clubs, no matter how much the cab driver seemed to think she should be.

She didn’t answer him. Instead, she paid the fare on the meter with a healthy tip and let herself out of the car. 

She watched the taxi drive away, then turned around and walked a few blocks back the way they’d come. Then she turned a corner and walked another two blocks, and then turned another corner and walked another three.

Along that block, she passed a gap between two buildings, too wide and open to be an alley. 

Maggie had mentioned this place, once. They had planned to come here, but Alex had been nervous, so they’d pulled out a city map and Maggie had shown its precise location and they had developed a plan for getting there.

It was the same plan Alex had just executed, three taxis and then a walk, to this very spot, where she could glance down into this space and see a doorway. It was industrial-looking, with no sound coming from within, but Alex knew. She knew what it was. She wanted to go there.

She walked past.

She walked all the way around the block to come back to it again, and there it was, that door, like the door to a prison or a vault that secreted away valuable things. It drew her, tugged on some part of her that filled the base of her throat. But then, as she got closer, she felt like the pole of her inner magnet had reversed, and that the door was repelling her no matter how much she longed to approach it.

She walked past again.

Halfway through her second trip around the block, she veered back toward Central Avenue, where she flagged down a taxi to take her back home.

\--

A week later, she went again. That time, she walked into the alley. When she walked past that door, she could just barely make out the sounds: a Ma Rainey record that didn’t sound out of place in this part of town. Voices, subdued, but many of them.

She kept walking straight through and out to the street on the other side, where she hailed a cab again.

\--

Three days after that, she returned again, and walked by twice.

\--

Four days later, she’d come from an evening with Max where they’d let photographers snap pictures of them holding hands on their way out of El Mocambo. She took the same taxi route, and exited near the same corner. She walked the same block, digging her nails into her palms as she turned down the same alley, determined, this time, to open the door.

Her heart rate sped up, blood rushing in her ears, but as she got close she could feel herself being repelled, again, her fear and her discomfort overwhelming her desire to please, please, please see what it’s like inside--

The door opened, flooding the little corner with soft, warm light and the distant, tinkling piano of a Bessie Smith record. It backlit a woman, dark-skinned and perhaps Alex’s own height, wearing cropped trousers and a fashionable blouse.

“You planning to walk by again, or do you want to come in this time, Miss D’Anvers?”

The moment felt surreal, like the door had opened on a movie screen instead of just a few feet away from her. 

The woman stepped back, making space for Alex to walk past her.

Alex swallowed the lump in her throat and clutched her purse with both hands because it was the only thing she could hold to steady herself. The woman’s eyes darted down to Alex’s white-knuckled grip, a fleeting glance but long enough for Alex to realize how she must look, holding onto her purse like that in this neighbourhood. She forced her fingers loose and shifted her purse higher on her shoulder with one hand, the other smoothing down the front of her dress as if it would wipe away that rather embarrassing mis-step.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and hoped the woman could tell she meant it. “I never know what to do with my hands when I’m nervous.” 

To Alex’s relief, the woman softened a little. She gestured down the stairs below her, where the light was brighter, warm and beckoning. “Everyone is, the first time,” she said. “Come on in. Vas’ll get you something to take that edge right off.”

So Alex stepped out of the darkness and down into the light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since we've posted this as a co-creation, please share your thoughts for both the words and the art in the comments!


	2. Part 2

A staircase led down and away from the door, straight and narrow enough that Alex could easily touch both walls at once. The foot of the stairwell opened into a room that was bigger than it looked like it should be from the outside, but was still small. The ceilings were just high enough to keep you from hitting your head on the light fixtures; there were two, each casting that warm yellowish glow Alex had seen from the road. 

One of the lights hung over the bar that ran along the end of the room nearest the stairs. It was a beautiful bar, carved in ornate oak, a strong contrast to the mismatched tables scattered around the rest of the basement space. There were perhaps ten of them in all, two-tops and four-tops that look liked they’d been rehomed from previous lives in people’s kitchens. About half were occupied, unsurprising for a late night on a Tuesday; pairs of women leaned close over two-tops and clusters of friends sat around two of the larger tables. There was a jukebox in the far corner where the Bessie Smith had given way to a Little Richard song; two couples stood up from their tables, then, and came together in the open space in the middle of the floor to dance a slow rhumba. Some of the women looked, to Alex’s eyes, like men; they wore tailored slacks and had hair slicked back into tight knots that could probably be loosened and styled more conventionally for their day jobs. 

Just as striking was that almost nobody in the room was white.

Alex had expected that. It was part of why Maggie had liked this place, she said; she could relax more here than she could anywhere in Hollywood. But still, standing here in the doorway, she realized she had never been in the minority of any room she’d been in for her entire life. 

The brief pause, in the doorway at the bottom of the stairs, was all the time it took for the room to start noticing her.

They would, of course. She knew they would. It started with the group at the table closest to her, one of the girls going wide-eyed and tapping the girl beside her. From there, it spread from table to table until even the dancers had stopped dancing, and the hum of friendly chatter had died down until Little Richard was the only one in the room making noise.

Alex wanted to turn and flee.

As if sensing it, the woman behind her, the one who’d met her at the door, laid a gentle hand on her shoulder and gestured toward the bar with the other. “Vasquez’s got you,” she said. “Everyone else’ll get over it in a minute.”

Feeling every single pair of eyes on her, Alex went to the bar and took a seat at a stool on the end.

The bartender--Vasquez, the woman had said--looked like a man, too, in an impeccable suit with a tie and sleeve garters holding her cuffs up and dry. Unlike the others in the room, though, her hair was short, neatly parted and styled with Brylcreem. 

“What can I get you?” she asked.

Alex almost ordered a martini. It’s what she usually ordered when she was out; classy and fashionable in a glass that looked good in her hand. But she didn’t really like martinis. She never had. And, at this point, now that she’d finally come into a place like this, she didn’t think anyone would judge her for ordering what she really wanted.

“Scotch, neat,” she said. 

“A girl after my own heart,” Vasquez said, with a grin that might have been rakish were it not infused with such genuine warmth. “Fair warning, our scotch is all blended and none of it’s great. Even our best bottle’s as good for removing rust as it is for drinking.”

Alex smiled. “I’m sure it’s fine. I could probably stand to shake out a little rust anyway.”

Vasquez threw her head back, a faux swoon, and grabbed at her own heart with a groan. “You sure this is your first time here?” she said, laughing.

It was only then that Alex realized that she’d flirted with the bartender.

She hadn’t even meant to do it.

Behind her, conversation had started up again, not quite with the verve it had had before she’d arrived, but enough for Alex to no longer feel like she was the center of everyone’s attention.

By the door, though, a patron in a mauve dress was talking to the woman who’d let Alex in. She wasn’t shouting, but the room was fairly quiet and her voice was firm so Alex could make out occasional words: password, HUAC, rat, spy. 

Of course, Alex thought. It hadn’t occurred to her, but of course they thought she was a spy, serving out some government agenda to keep herself off the blacklist. It was almost enough to make her want to walk back out the door again to let these women feel safe.

Vasquez set Alex’s drink down on the bar-top and followed the line of her gaze. 

“Don’t worry,” Vasquez said, “Megann will get her settled.”

Megann, Alex assumed, was the woman who had met her at the door--who, sure enough, was making placating gestures that seemed to pacify the woman in front of her.

Alex exhaled a shaky breath and then turned back to face the bar. The scotch was swill, but even a sip of it seemed to calm her nerves.

“I understand why she thinks that,” Alex said. “I’m surprised you let me in the door.”

Vasquez shrugged and started wiping down the bar top with a towel. “If they wanted you to snitch, they wouldn’t have sent you here, they’d have sent you to one of the places in West Hollywood where you’d catch the people they care about. And plus,” she shrugged. “Maggie vouched for you.”

Alex blinked.

Her heart thudded. 

Maggie had vouched for her.

When had that happened? Had it been before they’d split up, or since? How often did Maggie come here, that her word carried so much weight? Alex felt herself spiralling, each question dragging her deeper, and she wrapped her hands tightly around her glass to keep herself from downing the rest of it in a manner entirely undignified in this bar where, she found, she already cared what people thought of her.

Vasquez seemed to notice her panic and kept talking, good as she was at her job. 

“Usually, to get in, you need to know the password.”

Alex blinked. It was a half a piece of information, an invitation for her to ask a question to get the rest of it. She latched onto that question like the lifeline it was, even if a single word was all she could get out.

“Password?”

Vasquez flipped her towel over her shoulder and smiled that rakish grin again. “Changes the first of every month, and we plan them a month in advance. Right now, it’s ‘Dollywood.’ Next month, ‘Martian.’ After that, ask me next month.”

“All right,” Alex said. “Thanks.”

A pair of women approached the bar a few feet over from Alex, and Vasquez went to take care of their order. While she was doing that, another girl broke away from one of the groups and came to lean against the bar not far from Alex, clutching a paper napkin between her hands. She had pale skin and thick curly hair, like perhaps she had one Black parent and one white one, and couldn’t have been more than twenty-two. She took a deep breath, stealing herself, before she spoke.

“You’re… you’re Alexis D’Anvers,” she said.

Alex took a deep breath. It felt like it solidified something, somehow, for her to acknowledge who she was here, in this space.

“Yes,” she said. 

Nervously, the girl slid the napkin across the bartop. “D’you think--could I have--”

“Not here, Lila.” It was Megann, who approached from behind Alex with urgency in her step. 

Lila pulled her napkin back, chastised. “I know I shouldn’t, but I hoped maybe just this once.”

Alex furrowed her brow and opened her purse to find a pen. “It’s fine, I’m happy to--”

Megann laid her hand over Alex’s, stopping her. “Not. Here.” 

Alex lifted her eyebrows, and Megann sighed.

“This is for all of our protection. Lila knows the rules. You were never here, Miss D’Anvers, and neither were you, Lila. And if neither of you were ever here, then how did you meet each other to trade an autograph on a napkin?” 

It was, Alex thought, such a brutally obvious mistake. She had thought herself so worldly. She’d filmed in Paris, she’d travelled to a premiere in Tokyo, she’d vacationed in India and Brazil. And yet things as simple as this didn’t occur to her.

She closed her purse again.

“I’m sorry,” Lila said again, looking forlorn. “I didn’t think of that.” She turned to go back to her friends, and Alex couldn’t let her leave, not like that. She stopped Lila with a touch to the shoulder.

Lila looked up at her in shock, eyes impossibly wide

“My agent is Jonn Jones at the Jones Talent Group,” Alex said.

Lila smiled. “I know,” she said. 

“The address is in the phone book,” Alex said. “Write to me there to ask for an autograph. People do that all the time. Do you live in this neighbourhood?”

Lila nodded shyly. “Just a few blocks away.”

“All right,” Alex said, “then I’ll have my agent keep an eye out for a letter from Lila from South LA, and I’ll send you back an autograph. I won’t say anything, and you won’t say anything, but we’ll both know. All right?”

Lila grinned, clutching her now-crumpled napkin to her chest, her eyes wide and bright and maybe a little damp. “All right,” she said.

Lila went back to her table which, Alex now saw, had been watching the interaction with baited breath from across the room; they greeted her with outstretched hands and wide smiles. Alex turned back to her drink.

Megann propped an elbow on the bar. “Sorry about that,” she said. “We had to set that rule when Maggie started coming here a few years ago and our regulars went a little nuts. But she stopped coming for awhile, this last year or two, so some of the younger women who come here don’t really understand.”

Alex nodded. “It’s a good policy. Thank you.”

Vasquez topped up Alex’s drink, and Megann stood there, in her same spot, leaning on the bar, scrutinizing Alex with an expression Alex couldn’t parse. 

“You’re all right, Miss D’Anvers,” she said, eventually, with a nod like she’d made a decision.

Alex couldn’t tell whether the statement was intended to be loaded, but she unpacked it anyway. The was Maggie’s place; of course it was. They knew what she and Maggie had been to each other, because they knew Maggie and they’d heard the rumors even if Maggie had never told them outright. And because Maggie was theirs, they defaulted to viewing her through Maggie’s lens.

Through the lens of Maggie’s broken heart. 

But she was establishing herself in her own right.

The jukebox had ticked through a few songs since Little Richard had ended; it kicked into a Lucille Bogan song, now, that had a group of women howling with laughter and jumping to their feet to sing along. The music was three decades out of date, but the lyrics were raunchy, and their laughter was raucous, and the little dance floor radiated an unapologetic, effusive happiness that Alex hadn’t felt, or even been close to, in a long time.

“Call me Alex,” she said to Megann, to Vasquez.

Vasquez grinned and tipped her head in acknowledgment. 

Megann smiled and clapped her on the shoulder, like men did, before going back up to her post by the door.

Something tight in Alex’s chest, a tangled knot that had lived there for as long as she could remember, began to loosen.

\--

Once Alex had been to the basement bar, she couldn’t stop coming.

At the end of that first visit, Vasquez asked her how she’d gotten there, and Alex described her series of cabs and her drop-off a few blocks away. Vasquez looked impressed at her discretion, but gave her a napkin with a phone number before she left.

“Next time, take a cab to the USC campus and then call this number,” she said. “They’ll take you right here.”  
  
“Is it a taxi company?” Alex asked.

“Not… officially,” Vasquez said. “Al lives near here, and manages a couple of guys who drive in the neighbourhoods where the cabs don’t want to pick people up. He’ll probably charge you a little more than a metered cab, but he’s safe and trustworthy. He’s worked with us for years.”

So Alex did. The cab drivers, so reluctant to drop her near the jazz clubs, didn’t think twice about leaving her at the USC campus where, she assumed, they thought she was meeting some wealthy student paramour. And Al’s car was clean and smelled of his aftershave, and he didn’t ask any questions.

She learned, over her visits, that Vasquez and Megann owned and ran the place together. Vasquez had wanted a place where she could look and dress the way she wanted to at work, and Megann wanted to be her own boss, so Vasquez ran the bar and Megann ran the door and the books and found ways to make their money seem legal. Megann wasn’t even like them, Vasquez said, not really. She’d been with a few girls but preferred men, on the whole. 

“It was a solid business proposition,” Megann said, dismissively, when she overheard Vasquez and Alex talking about it.

But when she went back to her spot by the door, Vasquez leaned across the bar and said, with a tone of conspiracy, “Don’t let her fool you. There’s a lot of good business propositions in the world, but she’d go to the boards to protect this place and every woman who comes here.”

Alex began blowing off Max so that she could come to the bar earlier in the night and stay longer. After two weeks of cancelled meetings and unreturned phone calls, Alex heard from Jonn that Max’s publicist had been in touch to call off their arrangement.

“That’s okay, isn’t it?” Alex asked. “It’s done its job.”

She could hear his smile over the phone, and picture his look of paternal kindness. “Yes, Alex, it’s okay.”

Alex had hoped that this new confidence in herself, these new friendships she’d made with Megann and Vasquez, would help the loss of Maggie to stop feeling like an ache, like an organ removed without anaesthetic and leaving a gaping hollow behind.

It didn’t seem to be helping.

One night, Alex stayed later than anyone, even Megann; she sat at the bar while Vasquez wiped the tables and helped her to stack the chairs. Vasquez called Al to send a car for Alex and then they left together, Vasquez locking up behind them, and there, in that deepest darkness that comes just before sunrise, Alex made one more, foolhardy attempt at exorcising the ache that wouldn’t leave her: she leaned forward and stole a quick kiss in the alley. 

It was nice enough. Pleasant. There was something about Vasquez’s handsomeness, her confidence, that Alex had come to find magnetic, and she thought that perhaps that was how things started for most people. For people who weren’t like her and Maggie, dealing with scrutiny and studio politics. Perhaps this, she thought, would be the force she would need to help her stop falling asleep every night with Maggie on her mind.

The kiss didn’t flip her stomach like Maggie’s had, though. It was nice enough, and if nothing else, it gave Alex a sense of connection with another person, even for those fleeting seconds.

And when they pulled back, Alex could see in Vasquez’s eyes that this first kiss would be their last.

“I’m sorry,” Alex said, worried that she’d overstepped.

“Are you kidding?” Vasquez laughed. “That was great. It wasn’t right for us, but it was nice.”

Alex smiled.

Her next visit, they were still friends, bantering over the bar, but there were no more kisses.

\--

Four weeks after she’d first come to the bar, Alex started filming for her new movie. It shot for two months, right up to Christmas, and for that whole time, she only came to the bar twice, often too tired after work to make the drive.

The tabloids seemed to forget about her, and Alex luxuriated in the anonymity. She knew it was temporary; knew that her square would come up again in the gossip news cycle.

But for now, she got up, went to work, went home, and was so exhausted most nights that even her loneliness couldn’t keep her awake.

(She slept with both arms around a pillow.)

(The pillow wasn’t Maggie, but when her exhaustion overwhelmed her willpower, she imagined it was.)

Her longing for Maggie, her regret over the loss of Maggie, felt like a part of her, an ache that lived under the bow of her ribcage. It was constant enough that, sometimes, it blended into the background; she could almost stop noticing it.

But her movie was a melodrama where she played a woman learning to love again after her fiancé dies at war, and that longing, that desperation for someone you’d had and lost, wasn’t really an act for her, this time.

The director was over the moon.

The producer said she’d be their Academy Award candidate.

Alex was glad her sadness was good for something.

The work was exhausting, but it gave her an excuse to be out of the spotlight right up to the moment when her movie with Max premiered just a few days before Christmas. She had Kara come with her to the premiere and let the tabloids spin that Alexis D’Anvers, heartbroken by the gallivanting of the womanizing Maxwell Lord, had sought solace in the comfort of her family. Alex knew it would have been better if she and Max could have pulled off their charade through the premiere, but the allure of their supposed collapsed romance seemed to intrigue viewers as much as the romance itself had done, and the movie was a roaring success for the studios. After that, she fled to her mother’s house in Santa Barbara until the new year. The work schedule had kept her from her family over Chanukah, so she’d lit her father’s Chanukiah at home--the first and last nights with Kara, who came to visit--and made up the difference a few weeks later. Her mother fed them eight nights’ worth of brisket and kugel in a single night, and they exchanged belated gifts, and Alex enjoyed the time hidden away, so that when she returned to LA on January 2nd, not a single photographer noticed or cared.

Alex wasn’t sure if she was relieved or disappointed. 

\--

When Alex and Maggie were both shooting, they could go a week or more without seeing each other. They’d spend the day on their respective sets, then go home and sleep like dead things, and then wake up early to get to their makeup trailers in time to do it all again. They were rarely lucky enough to have their days off align, so sometimes they’d use those days to visit each other on set. They had to be careful, though. They couldn’t do it all the time and risk rousing suspicions.

But now, looking back, Alex could remember quite clearly, the precise moment when she realized she was in love with Maggie.

It was February. Valentine’s day. Alex knew what a hard day this was for Maggie every year, but they’d both been in the midst of long shoots, and couldn’t figure out how to see each other. Maggie insisted she didn’t want to, anyway. That she hated Valentine’s day and would rather spend it alone. 

Maggie had the lead female role in a comedy -- she was renowned for her skill in slapstick -- and Alex in her first and only Western. She got home late, as she always did, the car driving her past restaurants decorated with hearts and candles that she longed to share, even in her exhaustion. She imagined sitting across a table like that, Maggie’s eyes sparkling in the candlelight, feeding each other bites of decadent meals.

But the driver took her home, to her empty house. She’d been on location all day, out in the dust in the desert, so she showered, and was combing her hair out when she heard a knock on the door.

Not the doorbell, a knock.

She glanced at the clock on her nightstand. It was past eleven, and she was ready to drop, but she went to the door anyway.

Maggie stood there, satin pyjama pants poking out from under an overcoat. Her hair was down, loose over her shoulders, the fresh platinum blonde seeming to glow under Alex’s porch light.

“I would have called, but I didn’t want to risk waking you,” Maggie said. “I thought if I knocked, and you were asleep, you’d probably--”

Alex reached out. “You never need to call,” she interrupted, "and you never need to worry about waking me." She ushered Maggie inside.

Maggie had stood here, in Alex’s marbled foyer, dozens, maybe hundreds of times, but Alex couldn’t ever remember seeing her look so small. Alex noticed that she moved slowly as she unfastened her coat, stiffly, like she was sore, so as soon as she’d locked the door Alex stepped over to Maggie and batted her hands away from the buttons.

“I’m sorry,” Maggie said, and Alex heard the tremor in her voice this time. “I just--it’s been a hard day, this is always a hard day, and I’m really sore from taking trick fall after trick fall at work and I just, I couldn’t--”

Alex’s heart swelled and broke all at once. She pushed Maggie’s coat off her shoulders, off her arms, and tossed it onto the chair to the side of the hall, where it could stay for the night. Then she stepped forward and pulled Maggie tight against her, holding her gently but as strongly as she could, and Maggie melted into her, her breath puffing warmth down the inside of Alex’s collar.

“You shouldn’t be doing this,” Alex murmured. “They should have someone doing stunts for you.”

Maggie sighed, sinking deeper into Alex’s chest. “They’re never going to hire a double for me, Alex. Not for a slapstick.”

“You could get the Union to--”

“Not these days, I couldn’t.”

She was right. With HUAC scrutinizing everyone in Hollywood, even the appearance of labor agitation was enough to raise suspicion.

“I have tomorrow off,” Maggie said. “I’ll rest up, feel better. I just… I wanted to be with you tonight.”

That brought a smile to Alex’s lips. She pressed a kiss to Maggie’s hair, above her ear. “I have a late call tomorrow. I don’t have to leave here until 10:30.” Her arms loosened around Maggie and she stepped back, and Maggie, so brutally exhausted, swayed a little on her feet. 

“Come on,” Alex said, tugging her by the hand. “Come and lie down.”

Maggie had stiffened up even more from standing still. She hobbled after Alex to the bedroom, where Alex undressed her and lay her on the bed on a towel. She had a bottle of liniment oil in her bathroom, and when she opened it, it filled the room with the clean scent of menthol and camphor. The tense muscles of Maggie’s shoulders, her back, her calves went soft as Alex rubbed the oil into their knots and bruises. 

By the time she was done, Maggie’s breath had gone deep and even in sleep.

Alex smiled, and kissed the back of her neck, and covered her with the throw blanket from the reading chair in the corner of the room.

The throw blanket was too small to cover them both, so Alex got into the bed properly, under the comforter. She nestled as closely to Maggie as she could with the duvet awkwardly between them. Novels always said that women looked young in sleep, but Maggie didn’t; Maggie looked every one of her years. She had lines in the corners of her eyes, and little wrinkles that passed through her dimples: marks from smiling, not sadness. 

Maggie looked like someone who had lived through terrible things but managed to seek out her happiness anyway. 

Gently, so gently, Alex pushed Maggie’s hair behind her ear. She ran her thumb down the line where her dimple formed when she smiled. She hadn’t meant to wake Maggie, but it happened anyway -- just a little, just enough for a dopey smile and barely-there kiss to the inside of Alex’s wrist before she was asleep again. 

She hadn’t been awake enough to remember it in the morning, Alex knew.

But in that moment, Alex’s heart had left her own chest and given itself entirely to Maggie. She imagined it like something vaporized, a cloud around Maggie that kept her warm and loved and protected.

All these months later, Alex still hadn’t figured out how to call it back.

\--

Maggie had Alex’s heart, and that’s why Alex felt she should have known. She should have felt it, the way your hands can find each other when you’re blindfolded. The way your don’t have to look at your feet to dance a waltz without falling over.

Alex should have known, should have felt, when she approached the other part of herself.

She went back to the basement bar the day after shooting wrapped. Al greeted her with a familiar nod when he picked her up at USC, and her heart lightened as they drew closer to their destination, block by block. It wasn’t that she’d made many friends there--just Vasquez and Megann, really. It was too hard to befriend anyone else; they couldn’t see Alex through the veneer of Alexis D’Anvers. She wasn’t sure Vasquez and Megann could have, either, had their jobs not forced it on them. The isolation of celebrity was familiar to Alex, though. It wasn’t unique to the bar. And she felt companionship there, a camaraderie, even with the women she’d never spoken to.

So Alex went back to the bar the day after shooting wrapped, and apparently Maggie had had her heart for so long that the rest of her didn’t even register it as hers anymore. 

It was a Friday night and the bar was busy, the table and the dance floor packed with enough chatter to all but drown out the jukebox. It was thrilling to be in a place like this, surrounded by so many people like her. She began to weave through the crowd, one or two people dropping their jaws in recognition as she slipped past, until she found her way to the far end of the bar.

“Alex!” Vasquez called, grinning. She held up a hand, indicating that Alex should wait, and then finished shaking the drink she was mixing. All the barstools were taken, but Alex knew Vasquez kept a spare behind the bar that she’d let Alex use.

While she waited, she turned and propped her elbows on the edge of the bar.

And then, just then, as though a director somewhere had ordered it, the crowd shifted just so that a line opened up, a window that passed from Alex all the way to the table near the jukebox at the back.

There were two girls sitting at the table.

One was a tall, beautiful girl Alex had seen before, with dark skin and dark hair and wearing a striking green cocktail dress. 

And the other was blonde, in fitted white trousers with a blue blouse.

She had her back to Alex, but Alex knew her as her left hand knew her right. She knew her as her feet knew the steps of a dance.

Maggie leaned toward the other woman, laughing. Alex couldn’t hear her laugh, not from so far away and over the din of the crowd, but she’d heard it a million times before. She knew what it sounded like, just as she knew the feel of her own laughter inside her chest and her lungs.

“You all right, Alex?”

Alex startled, and turned. Vasquez, with, as she expected, the extra barstool.

She forced a smile and forced herself to sit, turning her back to the crowd and Maggie and facing, instead toward the bar. 

Without a word, Vasquez set a glass in front of her and poured a healthy double of the better scotch they’d started carrying since Alex had become a regular there. 

“I’m glad to see you,” Vasquez said. She glanced up from the pour, meeting Alex’s eyes for just a second, and then down again. “We missed you around here.”

Alex understood the implicit meaning, and was thankful for it. _This is your place, now, too_ , Vasquez was saying. _You don’t have to leave just because Maggie’s back._

“I missed coming here, too,” she said.

Alex forced herself to stay until the end of her drink, and she forced herself not to rush it. She kept her back to the room, to the crowds and the bustle. Vasquez was busy all night, fixing drinks and running around behind the bar, so Alex didn’t really speak to anyone; she let herself be anonymous, tucked in the dark corner, until she finished her scotch. Then she waved to Vasquez, and left a healthy tip at the bar, and went home before midnight.

She didn’t see Maggie again that evening.

\--

The second time she saw Maggie at the bar, Maggie saw her, too. 

It was mid-week, and Alex had gotten there first, this time. She sat at the bar with her usual scotch, talking to Vasquez about Vietnam and whether the US would intervene. Alex, whose grandparents had fled the Russian pogroms, felt justified in her apprehension about the expansion of Russian political influence, but life in Hollywood these past few years had shown how communism had become a bogeyman that distracted from more important battles.

There were only a few patrons in the bar, and the jukebox was playing some decades-old blues records as usual. The stairs coming down from the door were old and hollow, acting as a resonator under the soles of good-quality shoes. Since she’d started coming here, Alex had heard hundreds of sets of feet coming down those stairs. In the first weeks, the back of her brain met every new arrival as a threat, so she would watch the foot of the stairs until some new woman emerged, smiling or sad or preoccupied but never dangerous. The passage of time dulled that nervousness, and as Alex felt safer, she stopped noticing the sound of people walking in.

And yet for some reason, on this particular day, the sound of arriving footsteps on the stairs drew her attention, and she looked, just in time to see Maggie step out of the stairwell and into the room, where she saw Alex and froze.

She was wearing slacks again, and a green blouse that somehow, even from across the room, made her eyes glint a striking shade of gold. The scarf around her neck was wound like an ascot, the masculine way that Alex had only ever seen her do in one of their homes.

Their eyes only met for a fraction of a second, and it filled Alex with a cacophony of emotion, an impenetrable dissonance of feelings clambering over each other until Alex, in defeat, turned back to her scotch Maggie turned to walk to one of the tables. 

A hand, a cloth, in her peripheral vision. Vasquez’s hand, wiping the bar in front of her, like someone waving a hand to snap her out of a daze. 

Alex looked up.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Vasquez said.

Alex wasn’t sure whether she was addressing the possibility that Alex might get up and leave, or that she might go talk to Maggie, or that she might swipe a bottle from over the bar and begin to pour it straight down her own throat, or that she might have a panic attack right here. All were equally stupid, and all felt equally possible.

But she took a breath, and sipped her drink, and fought the urge to turn around and seek Maggie out behind her. 

Of course she’d noticed the sound of Maggie’s footsteps. Alex’s own home was a single, sprawling story, but Maggie’s house had a second floor addition where the bedroom was. Alex knew the weight and rhythm of Maggie’s stride on the stairs; she knew it so well she’d recognized it, even if she hadn’t known why.

She recognized the sound of those footsteps as they walked across the concrete floor and stopped at the bar, a few feet away.

Alex took a breath and looked to her left. Maggie was looking back at her, leaning forward and braced on her elbows.

They didn’t say anything. 

Vasquez hung back a moment, clearly not wanting to intrude, but when neither of them spoke, she came in to diffuse the tension. “Hey, Maggie,” she said, with the same comfortable smile she’d given Alex a hundred times. “What’re you drinking today?”

Maggie grinned back; it was a genuine grin, the kind that pinched the corners of her eyes. “Now that you’re carrying Glenfiddich, I don’t think I’ll ever order anything else.”

“Double?”

“Sure.”  
  
“Coming right up.”

It made Alex irrationally jealous to see Vasquez be as comfortable with Maggie as she was with her. She had hoped, or perhaps imagined, that they had developed a friendship that transcended the standard camaraderie of the barkeeper with the regular customer--but maybe Vasquez was that nice to everyone.

It made her stomach clench. 

Vasquez poured the drink and set it in front of Maggie, and then, with a quick cock of an eyebrow at Alex, stepped away to busy herself with something at the far end of the bar. Alex didn’t know how to interpret the eyebrow move; it was like Vasquez wanted her to do something, but she really didn’t know what.

Alex expected Maggie to take her drink back to her table, but she didn’t. She stood there, one elbow propped on the bar-top, swirling her drink in her glass with the other and staring into the spiral. 

They hadn’t seen each other since before the _Confidential_ story had come out.

Every night since then, Alex had lain in bed and aggrieved by the cool pillow beside her. Some nights, she’d berate herself for having been so weak and unwilling to take risks for Maggie. Other nights, she’d wallow in anger at Maggie for having been so impatient, so unwilling to understand the importance of Alex’s career.

Were she an actor playing herself for a role, she’d acknowledge that all of it was a cover for deep bereavement and loneliness. She didn’t go to parties anymore, even the “safe” ones, too angered by the loss they’d brought her in the past. She was avoiding Kara, who’d been so excited about Max and so saddened when they’d called things off. Who wanted her to be normal.

But she was not an actor playing herself, and so she studiously avoided confronting these truths.

The _Confidential_ story had changed Alex, though. Or its aftermath had. This Alex, new Alex, came to a lesbian bar two or three nights a week between her contracts. New Alex had walked down the street with Vasquez, a few times, and not even been frightened by the looks they got. 

It was a different courage, but courage nonetheless, that drove her to inhale deeply, pause, and then say, “Hi, Maggie.”

Maggie didn’t turn her gaze. “Never thought I’d run into you here.”

Alex understood. Maggie had wanted to come here with Alex. Had wanted to be out with her somewhere where they could dance, where they could choose songs on the jukebox and enjoy being out the way couples did. That was the only reason Alex knew this place existed.

“I know,” Alex said. “I’m trying to…” She swallowed. That’s what she was doing here: trying. Trying to be less alone, trying to be less afraid. But why? To what end? “I’m trying,” she said again, and ended it there.

Maggie took a sip of her drink and turned to look at Alex with those brown-and-gold eyes. She smiled, but the smile was tight, it didn’t bring out her dimples, it didn’t reach her eyes. “I’m happy for you,” she said, and then turned and went back to her table. 

Alex looked down at her hands. They were loose around her glass, but when she let it go, they felt light, like she had to hold them down, to press them down to the table or else they might float up and drag the rest of her with them. But her gut felt leaden, and her feet felt like rocks where they sat on the rung of the barstool.

Vasquez came back over with another drink, a kind smile, and nothing to say.

\--

The next morning saw a frantic phone call to Jonn, who did some asking and found out that Maggie’s next role started in a little under two months.

Alex’s did, too.

They’d both be at the bar, then, until they were both back at work, and neither of them would be there. 

It was enough to keep Alex at home for a week.

But at the end of a week, she squared her shoulders and went out again. She had as much right to be there as Maggie did. She was as much a lesbian as Maggie was, and Vasquez and Megann were just as much her friends. And this was what Maggie had wanted of her, wasn’t it? To venture out? To be with other people like them?

So Alex started going to the bar again.

\--

Were a director to tell the story of Alex and Maggie’s life over the next month, he would do it as a montage.

Snapshots of Alex and Maggie crossing paths at the counter, or spotting one another upon arrival or leaving. Maggie in fashionable dresses or smart trousers, her hair up in a twist or a clip or fashionably curled off her shoulders. Alex in her more conservative frocks, but still modern and fashionable in shades of grey and blue and wine-red. One day, a dusting of brown showed at the roots of Maggie’s hair; the next, that was gone, her hair its usual sunlight-blonde. One day, Alex broke her mould and wore some calf-length trousers which she found she liked more than she anticipated. She began to wear them more often.

They strove to ignore each other, though they’d offer a friendly nod when their eyes caught by accident.

It happened often. Alex found that trying not to look at Maggie felt as viscerally inverted as it felt to try not to smile when someone told you not to. When Maggie was nearby, Alex couldn’t help but look.

“You should go talk to her,” Vasquez said. “She’s been looking at you almost all evening.”

But Alex didn’t.

The next time Alex came to the bar, she stepped out of the stairwell to see the golden light glint off Maggie’s hair over in the back corner, where she was kissing someone. 

Alex turned on her heel and walked right back up the stairs. When she got to the top of the stairs, she realized that Al had driven off and she hadn’t even stayed long enough to call for a ride; that was how Megann managed to catch up with her in the alley, bottle of whiskey--the cheaper stuff--in hand.

“I can call the car for you,” she said, her voice gentle, “or we can sit out here for a bit and drink this.”

Alex could have cried from that small act of kindness.

They sat in the shadow beyond the door, their backs to the building, where Megann could watch people as they arrived and unlock the door to let them in. Megann was kind, asking questions, but Alex quickly found that the last thing she wanted to do was to talk about herself, so instead she asked Megann questions about herself. Learned that she’d grown up here and lived here her whole life, except for a stint working in a munitions factory in Arizona during the war, where she’d met Vasquez.“She had long hair back then, and wore dresses like everyone else, but she looked so awkward,” she said. “Like her body was the wrong size for her skin, or something.”  
  
Vasquez hadn’t wanted to go back to Puerto Rico after the war, so Megann had brought her back to LA where they cooked up a plan to open their bar. It took them a year to get the capital to get started, and then they never looked back.

“Just a year?” Alex asked.

Megann nodded. “My daddy owned the building. Didn’t get much from that piece of shit, but I did get this when he died.” She knocked against the wall behind her. “Live upstairs, work below.”  
  
At the end of the evening, Alex tried to pay for the bottle they’d drunk half of, but Megann wouldn’t have it.

(Her next visit, Alex dropped an extra $10 into the till when Vasquez wasn’t looking.)

The next time Alex saw Maggie there, she wasn’t kissing anyone.

(“It wasn’t serious,” Vasquez said, even though Alex hadn’t asked. “Everyone needs to feel close to someone from time to time.”)

It went on like this, with Alex swirling in jealousy and longing and regret and stubbornness, until suddenly, it crashed to a halt.

\--

Alex came to the bar one evening to find a regular patron working the door, and Megann, not Vasquez, serving the drinks.

“Where’s Vas?” Alex asked, as she sat in her usual stool.

Megann shrugged. “Sick.”

“Nothing serious, I hope?”

“I don’t think so.” Her tone strove for casual, but the way she kept her eyes on her pour, the way her hands slipped a little on a glass as she picked it up, belied her nervousness.

Alex didn’t ask her about something she clearly didn’t want to talk about, but still, she worried.

Maggie was there, chatting with one of the regulars at one of the tables. Alex felt the pull of her through the back of her shirt, as though some part of Maggie had wrapped itself around her spine.

It was, by now, a familiar feeling, like the lining of a cheap shoe that had bunched up and couldn’t be flattened out again.

Megann didn’t smile much the whole evening. She glanced toward the stairwell with each new arriving set of footsteps. She was over-generous with her pours. 

Something was really, really bothering her, but when Alex asked, she just forced a smile and said it had been a long day.

Alex finished her drink quietly, and when it was done, she asked Megann to call Al for her. Megann did, and told her that one of Al’s drivers, Ray, was already on his way to drop someone off at the bar, so he’d be there any minute and could pick her up if she flagged him down to let him know she needed a ride. Alex had ridden with him before, so she paid her bill and said her goodbyes and headed up the stairs. 

(She felt Maggie’s eyes on her, but this wasn’t unusual).

The girl working the door smiled at her--they’d seen each other before, but she still seemed flustered when Alex passed close enough to brush against her sleeve in the narrow space. Alex smiled back, and stepped out, and went to stand in the shadows near the sidewalk to watch for Ray’s car.

Normally, the cars would pull up a half a block or so away from the bar, just to provide a little plausible deniability, so it was unsettling to see Ray pull right up to the alley. Unnerved, Alex stepped back into the cover of darkness, and then was further confused when Ray parked the car and stepped out to open the rear door himself. He was young, no more than twenty, dressed fashionably in a flatcap with a vest and tie. Alex must have moved, or her eye caught the light at exactly the wrong time, because he saw her, even as she hid in the shadows. His eyes were wide, something frantic in them, and when he saw her he held out a hand to her, looking desperate.

“Miss D’Anvers,” he said, “can you help me, please?”

Confused, she rushed over while he opened the door, and immediately heard a voice she knew all too well.

“Christ, Ray, I’m not an invalid,” Vasquez said.

But as she slid across the seat and out into the glow of the streetlight, Alex could see why Ray had been so worried: her lip was fat and crusted with blood, she had a black eye, and she was cradling one arm in the other, against her chest.

“Vas,” Alex said, reaching for her, but Vasquez flinched away.

“I’m all right,” she said. “Got mugged. They took my wallet. Just have to get an advance from the bar to pay Ray.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Ray said, worrying his lower lip with his teeth, “it’s on me.”

Vasquez shook her head, then winced. “Hell it is. This is your livelihood.”

“Here,” Alex said, digging into her purse for her wallet. “How much?”

Ray hesitated, looking to Vasquez before he divulged her route.

“USC rate,” she said. 

Alex knew that amount well; she retrieved four dollars from her bag for the fare and a healthy tip and then grabbed Vasquez’s elbow to steady her as she climbed out of the back seat. Whatever had happened, it looked like more than a mugging: she moved stiffly in her legs and her sleeve was torn.

“I’ll pay you back next time I see you,” Vasquez said.

“Don’t even think about it,” Alex retorted. It was only then that she realized she didn’t know where Vasquez wanted to go. She’d come to the bar for fare money, but now that the fare was paid, she was blocks away from home, in pain, without a car. They paused in the dark of the alley.

“What do you want to do now?” Alex asked. “Should we go down?”

As if on cue, the door opened and the sound of music emerged; someone left, a regular, who paid no heed to the figures in the shadows; she probably thought they were necking.

Vasquez followed the departing woman with her eyes until she was out of sight. The door swung closed, shutting away the light and the music from below. “I probably shouldn’t go down if I don’t have to. I’ll just get everyone all worked up.” She sighed. “Would you… could I ask you to be a pal and ask Megann for the keys to her place upstairs? She’ll let me stay the night.” 

Alex nodded. “Yes, of course.”

She left Vasquez there, in the dark, and ran down the stairs, the girl at the door watching her in confusion. Alex’s worry must have shown in her face because Megann noticed her and came over at a pace a little too fast to be casual.

Megann didn’t ask. Her eyes said that she knew. 

“She’s asking for your house keys,” Alex said.

Megann was nodding before Alex finished speaking. “Of course. I’ll get them,” she said, already turning to walk back to the storeroom behind the bar.

The light in the bar felt strangely bright, even though it was no different than it had ever been. Alex felt herself on display, as though everyone were looking at her. But nobody was looking; she could see they weren’t, even as she stood there with her fingers tangled together, gripping each other.

“Alex.”

She startled. Then she turned.

Maggie’s brows were furrowed, eyes looking up at her with a concern that felt like it was from another era. Another lifetime. “What’s wrong, Alex?”

Fish-like, Alex’s mouth opened and closed as she tried to decide what, if anything, she could say without breaking Vasquez’s confidence. It wasn’t Alex’s place, was it? To share Vasquez’s business?

Some things didn’t change. Maggie could still read Alex like a book. She kept her face soft, her eyes searching, surely able to follow Alex’s internal debate through the minute flickers of her eyes, the twitches of her lips.

Slowly, as though she were approaching a wild animal, Maggie stepped closer, a hand outstretched until it came to rest on Alex’s arm, just above the elbow.

“You can still trust me,” she said. “If something’s wrong, if you need help, I--” 

Footsteps interrupted them. Megann approached, keyring in hand.

“Let’s go,” Megann said, with a jerk of her head toward the door.

Alex followed her.

Maggie followed Alex.

Vasquez stood where Alex had left her, hidden in the shadow beyond the door. Megann, who knew Vasquez so much better than Alex did, recognized that something was wrong the moment she laid eyes on her.

“Christ,” she said, skimming her hands over Vasquez’s face, then her arms. “The hell happened to you?”

“I’m okay, Meg,” Vasquez said. “Couple of blockheads in letterman’s jackets on the USC campus. Could have been worse.”

Megann’s shoulders sank, her head tipping forward, tired. “Why, because you’re still conscious? I told you that girl was bad news.”

“It was just a bit of fun,” Vasquez began, but Alex stepped back, turning away. 

Her body convulsed, just once: a deep, gut-clenching shudder.

Vasquez hadn’t been mugged. Vasquez had been attacked. For being who she was. For looking like she did.

The dark seemed to close in on her. In the distance, Alex could hear cars rumbling along Central Avenue, the late-night partygoers making their way from the restaurants to the after-hours lounges. 

When Alex had been afraid, in the past, it was a fear for her reputation, for her career, 

She had never feared for her physical safety, though. Not really. It hadn’t occurred to her.

Maggie noticed. Of course, Maggie noticed; she put a hand on Alex’s elbow and ducked her head low enough to meet Alex’s downcast eyes. 

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.

Alex looked at her, at those eyes that had been so steady for her for so long. 

Her lodestar.

Vasquez had gone to see a girl at a university campus and had gotten attacked for it.

Alex opened her mouth. Her lipstick was long worn off; her lips felt tight and dry, like they’d crack if she moved them wrong.

She had so much she wanted to say, and yet between her pounding heart and Maggie’s bright eyes and the sound of hushed voices a few feet away, she seemed to have forgotten every word she’d ever known.

“This is the world we live in.” 

Alex blinked. She realized Maggie was talking.

“Our happiness is dangerous,” Maggie said. “We always have to decide what we’re willing to risk.”

Alex felt her breath deep and cool in her lungs.

The sound of approaching footsteps--Megann’s and Vasquez’s--saved her from having to respond.

“Thanks for your help,” Megann said, “I’m going to get her settled upstairs and then--”

“Like hell you will,” Vasquez interrupted. “You need to go back downstairs. I’ll settle myself.”

It was shocking to see Megann, usually so composed, looking so frustrated. “You’re really hurt, Vas,” she said. 

“And I bet you tomorrow’s tips that Linda’s already had her hand in the till down there, unsupervised,” Vasquez said, rolling her eyes. “I’ll be fine to settle myself.” 

They bickered a moment longer before Alex finally interrupted: “We’ll get her settled, Megann.”

Beside her, Maggie twitched, but didn’t disagree. 

Vasquez began to protest, and Megann began to snap back, but before their argument could get far, Megann held her hand up.

“Fine,” she said. She held her keys out toward Maggie, who took them. “Make sure she lies down. I’ve got an icebox up there, put something cold on that wrist.” She looked at Vasquez. “The spare bed, not the sofa, you nitwit.”

Vasquez tipped her head, somehow making it look like an exaggerated salute even without the use of her hands.

Megann rolled her eyes and then turned, disappearing down the stairs.

With Megann gone, the other three stood in silence, facing each other in the corridor of dim, orange light coming from the streetlight near the road. Vasquez’s eyes narrowed, clearly debating whether to try to bully Maggie into just giving her the keys, so Alex straightened, channelling the most stern roles she’d ever played. There was a quiet “clink” as Maggie’s fist tightened around the keyring--the only indication that she, too, was steeling herself.

It was enough for Vasquez to notice. She sighed, then turned and began to walk toward the sidewalk.

“It’s this way,” she said.

The building was stucco, a nondescript box, two stories above the basement bar. The street-level storefront advertised appliance repairs. Beyond that, a door, blank and dented and industrial in its appearance except for the very residential-looking mailbox mounted to its side. 

Vasquez took the keys from Maggie and unlocked the door, which opened to a flight of dark wooden stairs. Up they walked to another door at the top, a white one this time, clean-looking and domestic. Vasquez unlocked that one, too, and then they were in Megann’s home.

It was the kind of home that Alex, child of Hollywood’s upper echelons, had seen on film sets but never in real life. They stepped into a large space that was both kitchen and living room, counters and cooktops and the icebox clustered in one corner with a formica table and chairs nearby. On the opposite side of the room was a Persian-style rug with two mismatched armchairs and an overstuffed sofa and a small television in the corner. The whole space felt warm; the wood floors, their varnish scuffed and worn, creaked underfoot. The cabinets, too, were a bare, polished wood, and the walls were painted in an ochre colour that reminded Alex of the dying glow of a campfire. There was a door to Alex’s right, probably to a bedroom, and two more on the opposite wall to the bathroom and the second bedroom.

Maggie had walked up behind Alex. She emerged beside her now, and there was something comfortable about her, the slope of her shoulders soft and relaxed, as though the space were familiar to her.

“Have you been here before?” Alex asked.

Maggie only shook her head.

Vasquez, meanwhile, kicked off her shoes and stretched out on the sofa, her arm still held to her chest.

But Alex remembered what Megann had said. “Bed, Vas.”

Vasquez rolled her eyes. “I will. It’s fine. Just toss me some frozen peas or something for my wrist, and you can go.”

Alex was tired, the evening long and full of difficult surprises, and was tempted to let Vasquez win. But Maggie’s spine was stronger.

“Let me see your wrist,” she said, stepping forward.

Vasquez flinched. “It’s fine.”

“If it’s fine, then let me see it.”

“It’s fine, so you don’t _need_ to see it.”

 _The lady doth protest too much_ , Alex thought. It was so obviously a lie, and the lie was concerning. She glanced at Maggie, who met her eyes.

 _Money?_ Alex asked, with her shoulder and her eyebrows and not even the outline of a word.

Maggie tipped her head to the side, an uncertain agreement, but then stiffened, as though she’d thought of something, and her face turned grim. 

Cautiously, Maggie approached Vasquez on the sofa. “I know a good doctor.”

Vasquez rolled her eyes. “Really. It’s fine. Turn on the tube, would you?”

But Maggie didn’t turn on the television. She went, instead, and crouched near Vasquez while Alex watched.

“That wrist is awfully bruised,” Maggie said. “It might need to be cast.”

“Jesus, Maggie--”  
  
“An untreated fracture can affect your grip strength and your dexterity. You could have permanent pain in your arm--not great for a bartender.”

Even from where she stood, hovering by the door, Alex could see Vasquez’s shoulders stiffening, whether in anger or fear or frustration.

She went to the icebox and rooted around inside for a bag of frozen peas.

“Maggie, you--” Vasquez faltered. 

Alex found the peas, and when she turned around, she saw her friend looking younger, smaller, more defeated than she’d ever seen.

“You know why I don’t see doctors,” Vasquez said, her voice secretive, sliding into a whisper.

Maggie’s smile was a gentle thing, her head tipping to the side, making herself soft and unthreatening. It was the same look she’d given Alex when Alex, dressed in Maggie’s clothes and her hair drying form the rain, had forced her eyes up from the sofa cushion between them and first uttered the terrifying truth of her own homosexuality.

Again, this was the kind of moment Alex read in screenplays and engaged through lines fed to her, through feelings carefully rehearsed. She had never feared the doctor. But here was Vasquez, butch with a Spanish name and without money to burn, and Alex didn’t know which of these was Vasquez’s greatest source of worry.

Maggie nodded from her soft, unthreatening angle. “I know someone,” she said. “She takes care of everyone in West Hollywood.”

Vasquez, clinging to the vestiges of her bravado, spat, “This isn’t West Hollywood, Maggie.”

The peas were numbing Alex’s fingers. She walked around the foot of the sofa and perched on the edge of it, behind Maggie, and handed them to Vasquez, who took them without resistance. Alex rubbed her reddened fingertips against each other, the friction creating warmth. From here, she could see the spreading bruise across Vas’s forearm, the gruesome swelling.

“Maggie wouldn’t recommend someone who would treat you poorly,” Alex said. 

Maggie’s eyes flitted back toward her, surprised and grateful, before turning back to face Vasquez again. 

“I’ve seen her myself,” Maggie said. “She’s been good to me.”

“You’re _you_. And anyway, I don’t want to deal with the bill.”

“Then don’t,” Alex piped up. It was finally something she understood; a way she could help. “I’ll cover it.”

Vasquez’s eyes darkened. “Like hell you will. I’m not a charity case.”

“Vas.” Alex leaned forward, her knees brushing the backs of Maggie’s shoudlers, and dared to let a finger touch Vasquez’s kneecap. “Do you know what your bar has done for me? What you’ve given me?”

Vasquez’s eyes widened, her jaw setting. She said nothing.

“I’m _absurdly_ rich,” Alex said. It came out as an embarrassed laugh, fluttery, like it was so insubstantial it could float away. “I make more in a day on set than you do in a month, and I have inheritance from my father, and I make capital gains on some very good investments. And Vasquez, I owe more to you than to any of those things. Let Maggie make the call. Let me cover it.”

For a long time, the only sound in the room was the hum of the light filaments. The floor creaked even though nobody moved. Vasquez was glaring at Alex and Maggie in turn until, with a sigh, she relaxed back against the armrest, adjusting the peas against her arm.

“Sounds like you should be tipping better,” she said. The corner of her lips quirked into the slightest hint of a smile.

It was a joke, Alex knew. She tipped well. Really well. Sometimes she tipped the full value of her tab. 

But it was also a sign of acquiescence.

Maggie stood. She squeezed Vasquez’s shoulder once before going to the kitchen where the telephone was mounted on the wall near the refrigerator. There was a telephone book on the counter top and she began to leaf through it, looking for the number she needed.

Perched on the edge of the sofa, Alex stayed where she was. Vasquez eyed her with a gaze that seemed to pierce right through her. It was intimidating; Alex cast her eyes to the side, toward the ground.

“Alex,” Vasquez said.

Alex looked up.

“Get the TV?” 

_Oh_. Alex smiled and walked to the set. She turned it on and fiddled with the channels until she found one airing an old episode of _Suspense_.

Alex went to one of the armchairs and they watched together. They heard Maggie’s murmured tones from the kitchen, then the sound of the phone being put back in the cradle. Alex’s attention jumped from the TV to Maggie and back again. For someone who’d never been here before, Maggie seemed well at home in the kitchen, rifling around in the icebox for something and then in the drawers for something else. There was the sound of running water, and then she came into the living room holding a bag of frozen corn and a damp towel.

“For your lip and your eye,” Maggie said. “Want me to do it?”

“Hell no,” Vasquez retorted. The wound on her swollen lip was covered in a dry, crusty blood, and the skin around her eye was swelling. She rested the peas over her injured wrist and cleaned herself up with her free hand. By the end of it she looked better, but the cleanup had opened the wound again; she pressed the cloth to it and didn’t fight when Maggie perched on the back of the sofa and held the bag of corn to her injured eye. 

They stayed like this, a strange tableau, mostly quiet but for the sound of the television, until there was a knock on the door half an hour later. Alex walked down to answer it and was met by a tall woman, perhaps ten years older than Alex herself, who had clearly been called out of bed. She wore an overcoat over a nice pair of trousers, but her hair was in a long, simple braid down her back and she wore no makeup. 

When the doctor saw Alex, her eyes flashed in surprise, but she caught herself quickly.

“Miss D’Anvers,” she said, “I’m Doctor Hamilton. Miss Sawyer called me?”

“Yes, of course,” Alex said, and led her inside.

Dr. Hamilton was calm and efficient. She sutured the wound in Vasquez’s lip and was gentle in examining her wrist.

“Definitely a fracture,” she said, “but not a severe one. I’ll leave you with a splint if you’ll get yourself to a hospital for an x-ray first thing in the morning to see if it needs a cast.”

“She won’t,” Alex and Maggie said together. Vasquez glared at them both, but Hamilton just laughed. 

“I thought you might say that,” she said. “I can cast it right now. It might be overkill, but better that than to have the bone heal badly and give you trouble later.”

Vasquez looked grouchy about it, but she nodded nonetheless. 

Dr. Hamilton was instructing Alex on how to mix the plaster of Paris when the front door opened and closed. A moment later, a bewildered-looking Megann emerged at the top of the stairs. 

“What the--”

It must have been a strange scene. The TV was off, now. The doctor had given Vasquez a pill for the pain before she’d started the sutures, so Vasquez sat loose in one of the kitchen table chairs, her eyes fuzzy, while she rambled about something to Maggie, who seemed to be nodding at all the right places. Dr. Hamilton had wrapped Vasquez’s wrist in layers of cotton and was explaining the plaster to Alex, who had taken her coat off and now had speckles of the stuff dotting her forearms -- and, she could feel, a bit on her cheek--as she stirred it in one of Megann’s mixing bowls.

“Meg!” Vasquez crooned. 

“Hey, V,” Megann said, her voice betraying little of the uncertainty in her eyes. She set her spare key on the table by the door and went to wash her hands. Without a word, she filled the kettle and lit the stove, and then pulled some mugs and a tin of tea down from one of the cabinets. 

They sat around the table and drank tea while Dr. Hamilton finished the cast, and then sat awhile longer as they waited for it to set. Hamilton left Vasquez with a bottle of pain reliever, a sling, and an order to call in two weeks. She took Alex’s address for her invoice, and as she was putting her coat on, said to Vasquez, “You can call me if you need me, you know.”

Vasquez, still loopy at the kitchen table, gestured with her good hand. “I can’t afford you, doc.”

For the first time all evening, the doctor let a little emotion show: a half-smile, the smallest curl of one side of her lips. “You’d be surprised.” She looked over at Megann. “You, too.”

Megann made a noncommittal sound. “Thank you for coming,” she said.

The doctor left. And a few minutes after that, Alex and Maggie were standing at the curb, waiting for one of Al’s drivers to come and pick them up.

Dawn was approaching, the sky greying over the shuttered shopfronts. There weren’t many houses here; it was mostly businesses, some of which probably had apartments like Megann’s on the second floor or in the back. On the weekend, Alex imagined there would be cars out even at this hour, ferrying people home from the clubs just a block away on Central, but it was a Wednesday night. Well, a Thursday morning, now.

In old times, in a moment like this, Alex and Maggie would have stood close. Not intimately, never intimately in public, but their elbows would have brushed. They would have reduced the space between them to micrometers, close enough that they would have been aware of each other by proprioception alone.

Today, though, Maggie stood far enough away that Alex couldn’t feel her. They were quiet for a long time.

“How did you know about that doctor?” Alex asked, eventually.

Maggie shrugged. “Word gets around. She mostly takes care of the men in West Hollywood. They have problems sometimes they can’t tell most doctors about.” 

Alex nodded. She didn’t know the details, but she could imagine. Her arms folded themselves across her chest, warding off an imaginary chill. Crises brought out the best in Alex. They always had. She rose to them, powering through. But now that this particular crisis had been managed, the reality of what had happened, what she’d seen, began to settle on her. 

Vasquez’s roguish grin split by a fat, bloodied lip. Her eye bruised and swollen. Her wrist broken.

All of that, and still she hadn’t wanted a doctor.

“This was the first time you’d seen that, wasn’t it. What can happen,” Maggie said quietly. Despite her wording, it wasn’t a question. 

Alex nodded, her grip tightening on her own biceps.

“Will we keep seeing you around here, then?” Maggie asked.

Alex’s spine stiffened. Her instinct put her on the defensive, but she breathed deeply and pushed past that reflex. Maggie’s voice hadn’t been angry or judgmental. It didn’t sound barbed.

It infuriated Alex just the same, but it wouldn’t help anything for her to get angry. Not now, not after the night they’d had, when they were both feeling so tired and ragged.

She levelled her breath, levelled her voice, and said, “I’m not as easy to scare off as you seem to think, Maggie.”

“You left the last time things got scary.” 

There was the barb, the suppressed anger pushing through the veneer of calm. Alex felt an answering rage bubbling up inside her.

“I didn’t leave,” she spat. “I never wanted to leave.”

“You refused to see me! A girl can take a hint, Alex!”  
  
“I didn’t see you for two weeks, Maggie! What’s two weeks next to the whole life I thought we’d have together? What’s a month to let a scandal blow over when I thought I’d grow old with you?”

Maggie’s body jerked, like she’d caught herself from reeling backward, eyes wide, jaw dropped just a little.

Alex’s seams were fraying. Her heart, her core felt solid, but the rest of her, traumatized from the night and exhausted and worn to the bone, seemed like it was running away from her, all parts of her racing in different directions.

“I was scared, Maggie,” she said. “I was scared then, and I’m scared now. But if you think I let fear rule me, then you never really knew me at all.”

Maggie’s jaw ticked shut. 

The silence vibrated between them, writhing and flickering, an electric eel.

“I needed you,” Maggie said, finally. “I bet Kara visited you. I bet she hugged you and told you that everything would be okay, that nobody would really believe something so scandalous about Alexis D’Anvers. I bet Jonn visited you and told you not to worry, that you’d still get work. I didn’t see anyone, Alex. Sam called, but she wasn’t going to drive all the way out to Burbank. My friends from the bar, the ones I hadn’t seen in months, they knew that calling me was too much of a risk. I was more alone than I’d been since I was fourteen years old.”

As Maggie spoke, the electric eel of their silence slithered into Alex, displacing her spine, replacing it with something soft and shocking, something that sent prickles and flashes and stings down her arms, down her legs, to the tips of her fingers and toes.

The motor of a car, distant, but getting closer. Al pulled up to the curb, and Alex and Maggie climbed into the back seat. They had agreed, when they called, to take the risk of having Al drive them both all the way home. Beverly Hills would still be asleep when they got there, and Burbank wouldn’t care either way.

“Vasquez all right?” Al asked as they got settled. “Ray told me she got roughed up.”

Alex nodded. “She’ll be okay.”

“Glad to hear that,” Al said. “That kid’s tough. When she came home with Megann after the war ended, you’d have thought she’d been a soldier like the rest of us.”

After that, they rode in silence for a long time, each of them looking out their own window. The sky was beginning to glow pink, diluting the light from the streetlamps. 

Maggie shifted first, facing forward and putting her hands in her lap. “I was impressed that you convinced Vasquez to let you pay so easily. She must really think of you as a friend.”

It was a peace offering. 

Alex turned to see her more clearly. “I wasn’t sure, before, to be honest. She’s nice to everyone. But I think she does. I hope she does.”

Maggie nodded, her lips pinched. Alex could see the questions bubbling behind her eyes. Between women like them, friendship had fuzzy boundaries, and of course, Maggie didn’t know that Vasquez and Alex had tested that boundary and found its limits to be comfortable. 

Still, Alex was grateful that Maggie didn’t ask.

Al drove to Alex’s house first, when the sky was pink and orange and the morning birds were beginning to call in the day. It felt uncanny to have Maggie here, with her, as they drove slowly up to the house. Because Maggie should be coming in with her. Maggie’s place was to come in, to undress, to collapse in bed together with Alex without even a shower and sleep into the afternoon.

But of course, Maggie would do none of those things now.

The car stopped at the sidewalk and Alex pulled her wallet from her purse.

“I didn’t know,” Maggie said, abruptly.

Alex looked up from the bills she was counting out. Didn’t know what?

“What you said before,” Maggie said. She looked nervous, like a child at a spelling bee puzzling through difficult word. “About… about growing old.”

The dollar bills crumpled in Alex’s hands. “Oh.” She swallowed. What more could she say to that? _Yes, I wanted to be with you forever. I thought it was understood. I thought we both just… knew._

_I still want to be with you forever._

She counted out the money, and then gave the same amount again for a tip, because Al had gotten out of bed to drive them, and he’d been kind enough not to eavesdrop -- or, at least, not to let it be seen if he had.

She opened the door and stepped out, but when she turned to close it, she paused and ducked her head down to see Maggie’s eyes again. 

“I didn’t know either,” she said. “How alone you felt. I didn’t know, and I didn’t ask. And I’m…” Her breath shook. “I’m sorry that I didn’t know.”

“I’m sorry too,” Maggie said, without hesitation.

Alex smiled, and Maggie smiled back.

Then, with a small nod, Alex closed the door.

The sound of the engine idling at the curb was a comfort as she walked up her front steps. Once she’d unlocked her front door, she heard the car shift into gear and groan away into the street, leaving her alone.

She undressed and went to the bathroom to clean herself up before she went to bed. There were white flecks of plaster in her hair, on her arms, and one smeared on her cheek just below the orbit of her left eye. Later, she’d have to scrub to get that off. 

But that was for later. 

She felt cold, and lonely, and vulnerable in this big, echoing house all by herself. Sleep came reluctantly. But it came just the same.

\--

Alex remembered the first time she’d been with Maggie.

They’d been together, after a fashion, for more than a month, a courtship made of chaste luncheons out and tender dinners in. They shared kisses on the sofa, Maggie’s hands so firm and confident when Alex’s were so nervous and fumbling. When Alex had screwed up all her courage and laid her hand on Maggie’s breast, even covered with cardigan and blouse and brassiere, she’d been overcome by the twin sensations of lust and scandal, as though she might be caught doing something she shouldn’t. But Maggie had shuddered, her breath warbling against Alex’s lips, and had clapped her hand over Alex’s, a frantic, hooked claw, holding it in place.  
  
“That’s good?” Alex had asked, moving her hand a little, and Maggie made a small sound of assent, not words, almost a hiccup, but her hand palmed the back of Alex’s, asking for more pressure. It was strange to touch another woman like this, to feel how the weight and shape were different from her own and yet somehow to have that knowledge so immediately subsumed under something more primal. She could feel the nipple under the base of her thumb, feel how it responded to her touch, and she was overwhelmed with the dual desires to touch more, touch deeper, with her mouth and her hands and no clothes, and to be touched in the same way.

They kept kissing, deeper and harder, stretching out across the length of the sofa where they’d been sitting. Alex’s hand found its way inside the cardigan and the blouse, and even this, just this, felt more profoundly erotic, more perfectly sensual than anything she’d ever felt having sex with a man.

“I,” she’d gasped between kisses. “I want--”

But Maggie pulled back just enough to shake her head between kisses. “Not now,” she said, “not here. Your house. Your room.”

Alex had groaned, but she’d understood, and she’d loved Maggie that much more for it. For understanding that this was frightening, even if it was thrilling, and that Alex would probably be more comfortable if it happened in her own space.

It happened just a few days later. They had dinner at Alex’s house, a delicious roast Edith had made for them, and then later made their way to the bedroom. 

She’d never cared about looking at naked men, really. Men wanted you to look, wanted you to be pleased and aroused by whatever they could offer you, but she’d always thought penises were vaguely ridiculous sticking out like that and there was nothing about them that made her want to touch. But when Maggie was naked, Alex couldn’t help but avert her eyes. Maggie was beautiful, her skin soft, and the sight of her arose a prurient desire and curiosity that felt so new and foreign and strong that Alex’s instinct was to flee it.  
  
But Maggie had been confident and beautiful and strong. She’d laid her body on top of Alex’s, so much skin touching, and waited, strong and solid, until Alex was ready for more.  
  
Later that night, when Alex had been made to feel things she had never before known she could feel, she had broken down in Maggie’s arms. Maggie had held her close, their bodies warm in the cocoon of blankets.

Loneliness is a clever devil. Like beige wallpaper, it can live with you forever without your ever noticing it’s there, until it’s gone, until you’ve replaced it with something better, and you become angry at how long you survived with mediocrity when you had the capacity for grandeur all along.  
  
Alex had clung to Maggie and cried with the realization that she’d come so close, _so close_ , to setting herself up for an entire life of loneliness she’d never even known was there. 

Maggie had held her, and stroked her hair, and kissed her nose and her cheeks and her forehead and murmured, “I’m here. I’m here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pretty sure there was actually no overnight TV in 1955. Hope you'll roll with it anyway.


	3. Part 3

It took two nights for Alex to have recovered enough of her sleep schedule to be able to go to the bar again. When she finally went, Vasquez and Megann had traded posts. 

“I can mix a drink one-handed,” Vasquez said from her post by the door, “it’s the dishes I can’t do.” She was in good spirits, her cast in good condition and her arm in its sling. Megann worked the bar. She was less chatty than Vasquez, and her drinks a little less practiced, but she seemed to be enjoying it.

“I’m the one who stocks everything back here,” she said, laughing, “but then Vas moves it all to where she wants it and now I can’t find a damn thing.” 

“It’s in the most logical places!” Vas called down from the stairwell.

“Says you!” Megann called back. 

Alex wasn’t as close to Megann as she’d become to Vasquez. They didn’t have the same ease of rapport. But Alex had thought, over these past few days, about what Al had said in the car, about how Vasquez had been like a soldier coming home after the war. Megann had told her how they’d met working in a munitions factory. Alex herself had already been in Hollywood by then, and her war contribution had been in the making of films to keep spirits up. She’d played a nurse who had a romance with a soldier in one film, and she’d played the sister of a soldier in another.

She’d known women who’d worked in munitions and other factories making shells or bombs or airplanes. There were a few editors she knew, back in the studios, who’d done it. But she’d never had enough of a relationship with them to know what it was like.

“What was it like, working in the munitions factory?” she asked.

Megann shrugged. “Loud. Tiring. Still the best job I ever had.”

"Hey!" Vasquez called.  
  
Megann smirked. "I mean before this one, of course."

Alex had become intrigued by their friendship, by Vasquez's ease and comfort in Megann's apartment, and by the seriousness of Megann's worry when Vas had been hurt.  
  
"How did you meet there?" she asked. 

“She was something back then.” Megann's eyes went distant, gazing into the past. “You wouldn’t have recognized her, in her frilly dresses with her long hair."

“In case you haven't noticed, I can _hear_ you,” Vasquez called from the stairwell.

“It's true, though! You can’t deny it!” Megann called back.

“Watch me!”

Megann’s grin was wide and warm, full of a that same gentle affection that Alex had seen the other night, striking from someone usually so stoic.

And Alex couldn’t, for the life of her, imagine Vasquez with long hair and a frilly dress. 

“Anyway,” Megann said, as she began wiping down the counter, “Even in the war, when factories started hiring girls, they usually only hired white girls. I was doing domestic work when I heard about a factory in Arizona that was hiring black girls too. Paid us half the wages, but still, it was a way out of housework so I made my way out there. Met Vasquez on our first day. I could tell right away she was out of place, in her fancy, expensive clothes looking around like the roof was going to fall on her. So I tried to take care of her.”

 _Expensive clothes_? Alex thought.

“Saved my tail is what you did.”

While Megann had been talking, Alex hadn’t noticed Vasquez walking up. 

“I was a sissy rich kid from Puerto Rico who didn’t know a thing about work or jobs,” Vas said. “I’d have gotten fired so fast if not for you.”

Megann stopped wiping the counter and narrowed her eyes. “Don’t you have a door to watch?”

“Yeah, I’m watching it!” Vasquez turned pointedly to face the stairwell, propping her hip against the bar. “It’s boring up there alone.”

“And yet I make it work every day.” Megann rolled her eyes. “Take Alex with you for company. We’re going to lose business if you’re not there to let people in.” Then she smiled at Alex. “She’ll tell you the rest.”

Alex followed Vasquez back up the stairs, her drink in her hand, and stood a few steps below her at the top, by the door.

“I didn’t know you were from Puerto Rico.” In retrospect, it embarrassed her to realize that she’d always assumed that if Vasquez was from anywhere outside the 48 states, she was probably from Mexico. 

Vasquez nodded. “Big sugarcane family. Lots of money, lots of prestige and influence, didn’t know what to do with a little girl who kept wrecking her dresses and stealing her brother’s clothes.”

This imagination of Vasquez--as a girl in dresses, but also as a girl from a moneyed family, raised with prestige--gave Alex whiplash, and Vasquez seemed to notice.

“I know,” she said, “it’s hard to picture, right?”

“How did you end up in Arizona?” 

“I ran away,” Vasquez said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “I was eighteen, and my family was trying to angle me into a strategic marriage, but I’d known for years I couldn’t marry a man. Then the war started, and I heard there were places hiring women to work in America. I stole some money and valuables from home and bribed my way onto a boat. Found my way to Arizona because I kept getting on the buses that would take me furthest away from Florida.”

Alex felt her eyes go wide. “This is like a movie plot,” she said. 

The fingers in Vasquez’s cast flicked in Alex’s direction, a dismissal. Of course: movies don’t tell stories about young homosexual tomboys from Puerto Rico trying to build lives on their own terms. 

“It’s wild to think that so much had to happen for you and Megann to meet each other and start this place,” Alex said.

There was a knock on the door; Vasquez took the password and then let in a young woman Alex had seen a few times before. She glanced at Alex as she walked by, and then averted her eyes down the stairs, shy.

Vasquez’s eyes followed the girl down, but they lingered at the bottom of the stairwell for several seconds after she had left it. 

She hadn’t been looking at the girl. Not really.

“Megann has saved me in so many ways,” Vasquez said. “Saved me from getting trampled by a world I didn’t know how to live in. Saved me from those dresses I still wore when we met and the first name I don’t even tell anyone anymore.” Her eyes shifted, pulling their focus closer. “She’s the one who cut my hair, you know. After the war, before I came with her to LA. She helped me get clothes I liked, too. The very first time I looked in a mirror and saw a reflection I liked, she was in it, standing behind my shoulder.”

Another knock, another password, another girl. Vasquez didn’t watch this one walk in.

Vasquez had never given this much of herself before. It could be that everything they’d been through the other night had caused her to trust Alex more, but Alex didn’t think that was it. Here, in the sallow light of the stairwell, with her eyes averted toward the door, Vasquez just seemed to want to talk.

Alex wondered if this conversation about Megann might be the reason.

“She’s more than a business partner to you,” Alex said.

“She’s the only family I’ve got.” Vas tipped her head back, leaning against the stairwell wall, and cast her eyes toward a dark corner. “You know, when we started this place, I think that was the first time I ever got to be the one to help her with anything. I took out a personal loan from the bank. They wouldn’t give her one. Which is stupid as hell, because I don’t know a single thing about how to handle money and she’s brilliant at it.” Vasquez sighed then, and straightened up, returning to her more typical, jovial tone. “But, well, the world’s a mess, what’s new.”

Alex raised her glass. “I’ll drink to that.”

There was another knock.  
  
Vasquez slid open the tiny window and smiled a little when she saw who was on the other side, but she asked for the password anyway.

The voice that answered made Alex’s spine go rigid.

The door opened, and Maggie stepped inside.

“Vasquez!” she said, and immediately opened her arms for a hug. Vasquez ducked to hug her, awkward with her sling between them, but Maggie was gentle, careful with her. Maggie was always careful, treating everyone as though they were precious. “I’m so glad to see you’re here.”

“Takes more than a bad night to keep me out of here,” Vasquez said.

Alex stood stiffly, unsure about where she and Maggie stood, now. They’d taken a terrible evening and salvaged something out of it, between them, but she wasn’t sure what.

After she stepped out of the hug, Maggie turned to Alex. She didn’t open her arms, didn’t offer a hug or anything like it, but her smile was genuine. “Hi, Alex,” she said, and her voice didn’t sound stilted or awkward.

“Hi, Maggie,” Alex said back, trying and failing to achieve Maggie’s level of nonchalance.

Apart from the other night with Vasquez, and the first night they’d both been in the bar, this was the first time they’d acknowledged each other in this space.

Maggie smiled, a careful acknowledgment that she'd noticed the milestone, too. Then she slipped past them and headed down into the bar.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” Vasquez asked, after Maggie was gone.

Alex downed the rest of her scotch. “Sure.”

“Why didn’t you and Maggie work out?”

The ice cube in Alex’s glass was half-melted. She swirled it, listening to the sound of it spiralling circles, and tried to decide how to answer. The _Confidential_ article? No, that wasn’t right. It hadn’t been the article itself, it had been something in the handling of it. Three days ago, she’d have known how to answer; she’d have said, diplomatically, that the gossip item had done them in. The conversation in the car had changed everything. Alex had always felt that Maggie was the one who had left her; now, she wasn’t so sure. But Alex herself hadn’t wanted to leave. Alex hadn’t wanted it to end. It hadn’t even entered Alex’s mind that their relationship _could_ end.

“I think you’d have to ask Maggie that,” she said.  
  
Vasquez chuckled. “I already did.”  
  
“Yeah? What did she say?”

Vasquez turned her head and looked at Alex with an expression both bemused and, perhaps, a little sad. “She said that I should ask you.”  
  
  


\--

  
  


Things were different, after everything with Vasquez. Alex and Maggie didn’t magically become friends, but they were… friendly. They’d smile and wave at each other when they saw each other in the bar. They’d say hello to each other if they were close enough to speak. 

It should have been nice.

It was hell.  
  
The wound of Alex’s broken heart hadn’t healed, even before this, but it had perhaps begun to scab a little. Seeing Maggie so easily ignore her, finding herself forced to ignore Maggie, seeing Maggie befriend and flirt with and even kiss other women, had forced Alex to confront, as cleanly as she could, the demise of their relationship and the fact that it didn’t appear likely to be reborn. The kissing had only been once; for all the festering anger, Maggie wasn’t an unkind person and Alex was certain the only reason she’d seen the kiss happen was because Maggie was in the middle of it when Alex arrived. But that gave Alex all the more reason to assume that there was probably more kissing, and maybe even more than kissing, at times and places where Alex wasn’t there to see it.

All of that, the kissing, the dismissals, the silence, had burned, but eventually that burn had turned into something that cauterized the bleeding wound in Alex’s heart. It didn’t hurt any less, but Alex felt that she would survive it.

And now here was Maggie, being nice again. Smiling at her. Saying hello. And even that, a kind greeting, took Alex back to when they had greeted each other in kinder times.

It made her want to stop coming to the bar. But Vasquez had become important to her. Megann, too, but Alex’s kinship with Vasquez had only grown when she’d learned of Vasquez’s past. 

She, like Alex, had had everything handed to her.

Unlike Alex, she’d had the courage to walk away.

It wasn’t a courage that ended with that decision, Alex realized. She never heard the details of what had happened that night at USC, but she’d pulled together enough bits to figure out that Vas had been seeing a girl there on the sly, probably more fun than serious, and was on her way home when she’d had had a run-in with a huddle of fraternity brothers who didn’t like seeing her on their campus.

Vas’s spine was built of courage, and Alex was both terrified and inspired by it. Spending time with Vasquez gave Alex a sense of hope. A sense of possibility, of potential, that she could live the life she had come to want if she could only square the guts to take it.

But she came to the bar and saw Maggie, reflected in the mirror above the rows of bottles. She always saw Maggie in the reflection, because the mirror picked up most of the room. She watched Maggie laugh, watched her talk with other people, watched her sometimes sit alone.

It was like a blister had burst open again.

“Do I need to cover this mirror?” Vasquez laughed, once, and Alex was almost prepared to say yes. But the mirror served a purpose: it was there to let Vasquez keep an eye on the customers, to see if anyone was waiting to order a drink, even when her back was turned.

So Alex just laughed and played along, saying no, and watched Maggie’s reflection.

She had another role starting in a week. It was a good one--her second consecutive Technicolor film. There were more and more of those; studios were saying everything would be Technicolor soon, as the equipment got cheaper. It was a lead role, too; she’d be playing a socialite trying to conceal that her marriage was collapsing under the weight of her husband’s post-war shellshock. She could sink her teeth into it, and it would keep her out of the bar for six weeks. 

So for six weeks she was gone, and when she came back, Maggie was off filming her own picture for another three.

And then, one day, Alex was at the bar, and Maggie showed up, fresh off the wrap on her movie.

“Hi, Alex,” she said, grinning as she picked up her drink from the bar, and then she left to go sit at a table, as usual.

And Alex found herself right back where she’d been nine weeks earlier.

And then, two weeks after that, Alex had one of the most bizarre, most unexpected encounters of her life.

\--

Alex’s mother had read Cinderella to her as a child. It had been Alex’s favourite of the stories in the Mother Goose book. She hadn’t understood the Fairy Godmother, though. 

“What’s a Godmother?” she’d asked her mother.

“Well, for some Christians, a Godmother is a woman who promises to be like a second mother to a child, and to take care of the child if something happens to her real mother.”  
  
“Why didn’t the Godmother take care of Cinderella after her father died, then?” 

Her mother paused and thought a little. “That’s a good question, sweetheart. I don’t know. But sometimes there’s a right time to help someone. Maybe she was just waiting for the right time.”  
  
Alex didn’t entirely believe that explanation then, as a child. And as an adult, she came to understand the story differently: that Cinderella wasn’t a story about falling in love with a prince, it was a story about surviving in a world that’s brutal in its indifference. It was about finding hope when hope felt impossible, and seeing that hope come true.  
  
It was in the moment where Cinderella had dared to hope for more that her Fairy Godmother arrived. It was the act of wishing that summoned her.  
  
Much later, when Alex had made her harder choices, when she had confronted that brutal indifference head-on, she would think back to a day in April when she’d been sitting at the bar in a different seat from her usual one. As usual, it had been hard to stop watching Maggie in the mirror; Maggie in those fashionable grey trousers and a deep blue top that offset the brilliant platinum of her hair, smiling and laughing quietly at someone’s jokes. 

But nothing else about the evening was “usual,” at all.

\--

When Megann opened the bar door to let Alex in, the first thing she said was, “Keep calm, all right?”

Alex thought it was a joke she didn’t understand. “I’m sorry?”  
  
But Megann shook her head, dead serious. She closed the door behind Alex and said quietly, “Greta Garbo is here.”

This time, Alex thought she’d mis-heard. “Pardon me?”

“I bet this isn’t as big a deal for you as it is for everyone else here,” Megann said, “But just be calm and leave her alone, all right?”

Alex wanted to ask more questions, but there was a knock on the door and Megann had to attend to that. So she went down to the bar and assumed things would be clear then.

It was quieter than usual, which was surprising because it was no less busy than usual for a Friday night. But people were keeping their voices down, leaning across small tables and murmuring together. Ma Rainey was playing from the jukebox, filling the room with 1920s nostalgia and longing.

Maggie was there already, looking bemused about the whole thing, chatting quietly with another woman Alex had seen here often.  
  
Sitting at the bar, in Alex’s usual spot, was a woman Alex had seen a hundred times, but never like this.

Alex looked around. She contemplated taking a table, leaving Garbo some space and privacy, but then she remembered her own first time here. She wouldn’t have wanted other people to change their habits just because she’d shown up.  
  
(She wondered if Megann had said the same thing to patrons who came after she arrived: “Keep calm, all right? Alexis D’Anvers is here.”)  
  
The barstools were empty except for Garbo, so Alex took a stool a few seats over, closer to the middle. 

Vasquez came over and smiled, raising her eyebrows in a silent expression of _Can you believe this?_ “Your usual?” 

“Yes, thank you, Vas.”

Vasquez poured her a double of Glenfiddich. Alex took it and swirled it a little in her glass, as was her habit, and then took a sip, letting the familiar burn settle her. 

There had been rumours, of course. Whispers and titters that Garbo had preferred, or at least entertained, the company of women. But Garbo had left the industry before the rise of tabloids. There had been no _Confidential_ then. 

She’d managed to keep her secrets to herself.  
  
It was telling, really, that even with Greta Garbo sitting two seats over, Alex struggled to tear her eyes off Maggie, who was the only person in the room behaving in a way that even remotely approximated “normal,” smiling widely and easily, dimples showing, and laughing only slightly more quietly than usual.

Alex's eyes flitted to the right from time to time. She saw Vasquez try to engage Garbo in conversation once or twice, not pressing, just offering, and saw Garbo rebuff it politely but firmly. 

Then she went back to watching Maggie and longing.

Nothing, nothing at all, prepared her to have her reverie broken by the sound of a voice, only ever-so-slightly accented, saying, “Alexandra Danvers.”  
  
Alex hadn’t heard that name in years.   
  
She turned her head.  
  
Greta Garbo was looking at her from her spot a few chairs over.

It wasn’t the Garbo of Alex’s childhood. This Garbo was older, lines in the corners of her eyes and streaks of grey in hair that she appeared no longer to color. She was still beautiful, though. The kind of beauty that could hold the attention of an entire room without trying, a beauty of straight lines and sad eyes and ever-so-slightly imperfect hair. And she was looking at Alex with a bemused smile.  
  
Alex tried to smile back. “How do you know that name?”

“I’ve met you once before,” Garbo said. “You were too young to remember. A toddler. You were with your father.”

Her father, on whose coattails she would forever ride. Still, she couldn’t help but be surprised that her father had never told her she’d met Greta Garbo, even as a baby. He’d worked with all the great names of that era, though, she reasoned. It may just not have seemed noteworthy to him.

“How did we meet?”

Garbo sipped her drink. “It was on the MGM lot. I was on my way in for the day when I saw a man having a conversation with a producer on a different set, and he had a little girl in his arms. He was getting the strangest looks, a man with a baby on set. It was so unusual. So I had my driver stop. Your father introduced himself and you. Apparently your mother had been visiting her mother and your nanny had called in sick, so he’d just picked you up and brought you in with him. You just looked around at everything with your big eyes, and I thought it was marvelous. And then--I’ll never forget this--quite suddenly, he sniffed the air behind you, scrunched up his nose, and excused himself, just like that, to go get you into a clean diaper.”

Laughter surged out of Alex like a surprise from a cake, loud and boisterous and unexpected. In the mirror, she saw Maggie’s eyes shoot up, and for a moment they caught each other in the reflection.

Garbo was looking into the mirror, too, and when Alex’s eyes flitted from Maggie’s to hers, she smiled a little, knowingly.

Alex cleared her throat, willing herself to stop blushing. “Perhaps the reason my father never told me was to spare me the embarrassment of knowing that the one time I met Greta Garbo, I soiled myself in front of her.” 

Garbo waved her hand, scoffing. “You were a baby. And it made me remember you. Years later, after I’d left the business, I started seeing ‘Alexis D’Anvers’ on the marquee, and I knew it had to be you.”

It felt so silly when Garbo put it like that. Her name. The one she’d been given at birth, and the one she’d taken for the job. She hadn’t thought of it that way before. Changing names was so common in Hollywood. Almost everyone seemed to do it. Garbo herself had done it, too, shedding the foreign-sounding “Gustaffson” for the Anglicized “Garbo” just like Maggie had given up “Rodas” for “Sawyer.”

Maggie. For whom the presence of one of Hollywood’s greatest stars--and one of its greatest recluses--was only a mild distraction from the attractive brunette sitting across the table from her.

For whom Alex herself seemed not to be a distraction at all, even though Alex struggled to take her take her eyes from her. 

Garbo finished her scotch and waved Vasquez over for another. 

In the mirror, Maggie grinned and reached across the table, touching the girl on the forearm.

Alex downed her drink.

“May I ask you a question?” she asked.

Ice rattled in Garbo’s glass, cubes clinking each other, and she made a small sound in the back of her throat. “Okay.”

“How did you find out about this place?”

Garbo shrugged one shoulder, all effortless glamour and nonchalance. “People talk to people, who talk to people, who talk to people. Eventually someone talks to me.” She turned her head and looked squarely at Alex. “I was never one for West Hollywood.”  
  
West Hollywood, where lifestyles were almost an open secret and nobody cared until the police showed up on a raid, and then they’d make sure everyone cared.  
  
Garbo had never liked that kind of risk, or that kind of attention. That much everyone knew.  
  
In the mirror, the girl was touching Maggie’s forearm, now. Lightly, where soft, dark hairs belied the platinum on her head. 

Alex wanted to vomit.

She downed the rest of her scotch.

Beside her, Garbo set her own empty glass down on the bar, and then pulled a bill from her purse and tucked it under the foot and stood up. 

Vasquez came over. “Can I call a car for you, ma’am?”  
  
“No, my driver will be here soon. But thank you.” 

Vasquez nodded smartly, almost military, and backed away. For a brief moment she caught Alex’s eyes and made a face, an expression of _C_ _an you believe this is happening?_ , and then she made herself professional again, turning to take care of another customer’s order.

Garbo straightened her hat and then closed the distance between herself and Alex.  
  
“So it’s true,” she said. “You and Sawyer.”

Alex looked down at her empty glass and willed it to fill itself again. “It was. Not anymore.”  
  
“Are you sure about that?” 

Alex looked up. 

Garbo’s eyes were narrow. Her face was as perfect as it had always been, and her makeup still tasteful. But like this, up close, there was a sadness to her, like she might be about to cry. 

“She looks at you when you’re not looking,” Garbo said.

In the mirror, Maggie seemed fixated on the girl at her table.

“We wanted different things,” Alex said, as much to herself as anything.

“Did you?” Garbo slid forward, close, conspiratorial. “I left my greatest love for Los Angeles. She stayed in Sweden and married a few years later.”  
  
Alex swallowed. She clutched her empty scotch glass, still cold from the cube of ice. It sweated in her hand. “Was it worth it?”  
  
From the jukebox, Ma Rainey sang, _Where she went, I don’t know. I meant to follow everywhere she goes._

Garbo was quiet for a long moment. She looked at Alex, and then cast her eyes to the side, and then looked down to her purse, which she opened and rifled through. Eventually, she emerged with a crumpled pack of cigarettes, but she kept her eyes downcast, toward her hands, when she held it out toward Alex in offering. When Alex declined, she pulled one out for herself, and then fished out a zippo to light it. Garbo kept her eyes down when she inhaled, then cast them up, toward the ceiling, while she blew a towering column of smoke.

“I think I gave more to Hollywood than Hollywood gave to me,” she said on the exhale. “You see your name by itself at the top of the posters and think you have all you ever wanted, yes?”

Alex’s fingers were white on her glass, fighting not to tremble, but she answered. “Yes.”

Garbo’s eyes closed slowly, and when she opened them, they glistened. She was so impossibly beautiful, a superhuman symmetry to her face, her features so perfectly straight they might be severe were it not for those large, sad eyes. “What’s a poster? It’s paper. It burns hot for a moment, and then there you are, cold again, and alone.” Her eyes flitted purposely to the mirror, to where Alex had been distracted by Maggie’s reflection all evening. “I never wanted to be alone. Not really. Do you?”

Then she took another draw from her cigarette, ashed it in one of the ashtrays on the counter, and made her way out to the street.

Vasquez tried to make conversation. Garbo had left her twenty whole dollars for a tip! What had they talked about? Had Alex met Garbo before?  
  
But Alex didn’t have the focus for it. Didn’t have the stomach.

The bar livened up after Garbo left, people running from one table to another to chatter their excitement and wonder and curiosity. Maggie was surrounded, now, because unlike Alex, Maggie was comfortable making herself available, here. She was friends with these women, and they came to ask her things about Hollywood and Garbo and whatever else. 

Alex asked Vasquez to call for a car, paid more than usual, and ventured out to wait for her ride.

At home, she wrapped herself in her father’s tallit and lay on her bed.

Here, in this moment, even that didn’t help her feel less alone.

\--

A few nights later, Alex was back at her usual spot, sitting on the same stool where Garbo had been sitting (the _same stool_ where _Greta Garbo_ had been sitting!). Vasquez was rubbing her wrist.

“It’s almost back up to strength,” she said, “but not quite all the way.” 

Maggie wasn’t there. Alex wasn’t sure if she’d arrive later or if she was staying home for the night.

“Vas, can I ask you a personal question?”

“Sure, though I can’t promise I’ll answer.”  
  
"How did you end up seeing someone at USC?"  
  
Vasquez paused in her work and leaned against the counter behind her, propping the heels of her hands by her hips. She pursed her lips, considering, and then seemed to decide on the truth.  
  
"I met her at a meeting," she said. "The kind we're not supposed to go to."  
  
Of course, Alex thought. There were few places where Vasquez and a USC student would likely interact for long enough to form a connection, but a Communist meeting--the great equalizer, the great threat of their times--was one.

It was dangerous, though. Even putting aside the risk of going to a place like USC when you looked like Vasquez did, those meetings were crawling with undercover FBI, or so people said.

"Why take that risk?"

There was no apology in her eyes, no shame at all, when she said, “Because I’m human. I get… cold sometimes.”

Alex could understand that. Putting aside desire, putting aside more prurient needs, her skin itched with longing for human contact, these days. Nobody touched her but Kara when she hugged her, or, from time to time, the men she worked with in her roles. Her father’s prayer shawl was a poor substitute, used in desperation, and just as likely to make her feel worse as to feel better.

“I understand,” she said, hoping her conviction came through. “But why meet someone over there when there are so many other, safer women here?”

“I don’t shit where I eat,” Vasquez said, quirking her mouth into a wry smile. “Pardon my French, but there’s too much at stake. Last thing we need is for some girl with a broken heart to take her friends and all their business to some other basement because she doesn’t want to see me anymore.”

There were footsteps in the stairwell. Alex recognized the weight of them, and her chest tightened.

Vasquez heard, too, and she stood up squarely again, and finished her thought: “If it were just me, maybe I’d take the risk. But there’s Megann to think about. Her livelihood.”

Alex was starting to realize that Megann was never an afterthought for Vasquez. That Megann was probably the first thing Vasquez thought about whenever she did anything.

The footsteps stopped a few feet to her left.

“Hi, Alex,” Maggie said, and then, in the same breath, “Hey, Vas.” 

“Maggie!” Vasquez said, already reaching for the scotch. “The usual?”

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Maggie replied, shrugging.

Alex wanted to put her hands alongside Maggie’s neck and press down, opening those shoulders. She wanted to run her hands down the muscles there, feeling them soften and slacken under her touch, as they had so often before

Maggie’s shoulders were always tense. In better days, Alex would cup her arms over the curve of them and pull down and back, and Maggie would groan with the stretch of it, dropping her head forward, her chin toward her chest.

In the mirror, Alex watched as Maggie walked away. 

“Alex.”

Alex looked up. She expected Vasquez’s usual rakish grin prefacing some kind of lewd or sharp comment, but what she saw was kinder. More gentle.

“You don’t have to be cold, Alex,” Vasquez said. “Don’t be cold.”

\--

Another week passed.

Alex signed another contract for a Technicolor film to start just two weeks later -- she was parachuted in for a role that Audrey Hepburn had apparently vacated. The producers were thrilled, tripping over themselves to say how much better she would be than Hepburn, lying about how they’d wanted her in the first place.

She didn’t care. The role seemed fine. The money was better than fine.

Mostly she thought about how it would trap her in a trailer and on a set for two months. How she wouldn’t see Vasquez or Megann or Maggie (even from afar, Maggie) for the duration.

She realized, quite suddenly, that she hadn’t been excited for a role in a long time.

After yet another night alone, Alex woke up facing the pillow where Maggie had slept. She ran a hand over it, felt it smooth and firm and cold, unhollowed by another head. 

Her mind was made up.

\--

One week before she was scheduled to be back on set, Alex saw Maggie at the bar.

Maggie was already there when Alex arrived, chatting, as usual, with a woman there--someone Alex had seen her speaking with before, another regular. Leslie, Vasquez had said her name was.

Alex arrived and set down her handbag but she didn’t sit down herself. Vasquez smiled her greeting and poured Alex’s usual scotch without asking. That smile morphed comically into an expression of shock when, instead of sipping the drink like she usually did, Alex tossed it back in a single blow. 

“That kind of day, huh?” Vasquez asked. 

Alex nodded, splaying her palms flat against the bar-top on either side of the empty glass. She pressed down, steading herself, trying to calm the racing of her heart.

“Want another?” Vasquez asked.

Alex shook her head. 

She exhaled once, like Houdini bracing to be hit.

Then she hooked her handbag over her arm, turned around, and with a determination she’d been cultivating all day, strode into the main area of the bar. She wove past the few dancing couples, ignored the way faces turned and looked at her, and stopped by Maggie’s table.

Maggie’s conversation cut itself off abruptly. Leslie looked up at her with an inscrutable expression, some combination of awe and rage and indignation, and said nothing. Maggie’s smile--a smile she’d had for Leslie, not for Alex, not today--faded into an expression of curious bemusement.

“Maggie,” Alex said.

Maggie’s brow furrowed for just a second before smoothing out, regaining control. “Hi, Alex,” Maggie said. “This is my friend Leslie.”

Alex offered Leslie the standard, polite how-do-you-do and received one in turn, but then turned her attention back to Maggie. “Can I speak to you for a moment?” 

Maggie’s eyes skipped from Alex to Leslie and back again, clearly nervous and uncomfortable, so Alex channeled every role she’d ever played that called for confidence bordering on arrogance and said to Leslie, a sweetly as she could, “You don’t mind, do you? I’ll have her back to you in one piece.”

Leslie gawped for a moment, her mouth opening and closing like a fish, then blinked, and said, “No, no, of course not.”

It was a Tuesday. The bar wasn’t busy, and all the eyes in the room had turned to watch when Alex had walked to Maggie’s table. So Alex led Maggie to the stairwell and up. Megann tipped her head at them as they walked by, and Alex was grateful that her face belied no shock or surprise at seeing them together. And then they were out in the night.

When Alex turned around, Maggie was visibly annoyed. “What is this, Alex?”

Alex stepped forward into Maggie’s space. The night was moonless, so they were lit only by the streetlight that wound between the buildings from the road, tinting Maggie’s skin with its warm, tungsten light. It was perfect, unblemished skin, and Alex’s fingers remembered how soft it was to touch, the baby-fine tiny hairs. Alex remembered dancing with her in the living room, cheek to cheek. Alex, who had grown up with dancing lessons, had worked out the lead without too much trouble, and they’d settled into a rhumba box step, their bodies flush, Maggie’s hand tucked into Alex’s chest. 

She held onto that memory, wrapped it tight around her heart, as she said, “I want to try again.”

Maggie’s spine turned ramrod straight. “Try what again?”

It was a an obvious deflection; a deferral for time. Stalling. 

Alex pushed through. “Us, Maggie.”

Now Maggie gaped, frozen like Leslie had been down in the bar. She crossed her arms over her chest, each hand gripping the opposite biceps, and cast her eyes down, into the shadows.

It was beginning to feel like rejection--a rejection Alex had braced herself for, but still wasn’t ready to hear. So she began to ramble, filling the quiet with noise that could only defer the bad news she didn’t want to hear:  
  
“I’ve missed you, Maggie. I miss you every night. I see you here and I want to be here with you, together, not sitting across the room from you and trying to pretend you’re not all I’m thinking about. I can’t figure out how to stop, I don’t _want_ to stop, being in love with you, and I just want--”

She hadn’t even noticed that she’d stepped forward, that she’d tried to take hold of Maggie’s hands, until Maggie jerked them free and stepped away.

“What about the next tabloid story?” Maggie asked, interrupting the rambling.

Alex’s jaw ticked shut. She wrapped her arms around herself, wishing they were around Maggie instead. “We’ll deal with it when it comes.”

“But how? How will we deal with it?”

A foreboding settled over Alex, a leaden blanket buckling her knees, driving her feet into the ground. “We’ll work it out.”

“But _how_ , Alex?”

Alex searched for an answer that felt honest. The depression she’d lived with for so long, now, the echoing hollow of her chest, made it hard to wrap her head around potentials. They were too ephemeral, too amorphous. As she clutched her hands together, now, her hands were the only things that felt real.

“I don’t know,” she said, “but we will. You’re the most important thing, I can’t--”

“No, I can’t.”

Alex shut up.

Maggie’s eyes were glistening, bright and sharp in the reflected light. She passed a hand over her head, pressing it down to highlight the black roots below the blonde. 

“I need to come first for someone,” Maggie said, and oh, God, she was crying. She hadn’t brought her purse out with her so Alex ruffled in her own, coming out with a tissue, and Maggie wasn’t too proud to take it. “I need to come first for someone,” she said again. “I can’t be happy with someone if I’m always afraid she’s going to decide this is too hard, that loving me is too hard. Everything is hard in Hollywood right now, with the tabloids and the blacklist. We’re all on edge, and I just--I can’t be with someone who’s going to decide it’s easier to cut me out than to cut out the rest of it.”

Alex’s heart, patched together with sellotape, shattered. “No, Maggie--”

“I’m tired of only being important to anyone for what I _could_ be, not for what I am,” Maggie pressed on. “I want to be with someone who looks at me, and sees me, and _knows_ me, and would still give up as much for me as I would for her.” 

The world spun; Maggie was its vortex, still while the storm orbited her. Alex felt buffetted, one way and the other, both sucked in and spun away. “I would,” she said, her voice going thick. “You’re everything, I would give anything--”

Maggie shrugged and shook her head, looking small and strong and painfully sad. “I don’t think that’s true, Alex.”

Alex held herself, trying to stop the spinning.

“I’m sorry,” Maggie said, and then walked past her, back to the bar door.

The ground wobbled, Alex staggered, catching herself, managing not to fall. She had to get home. She needed a car, but she couldn’t, she wouldn’t, go back in to call for one. She’d have to walk out to Central and flag down a cab, like she’d done back in the days when she’d been working up the courage to come in. The sidewalk curved away from her, then snaked back and curved the other way. Was this the right direction? She couldn’t tell. Couldn’t remember.

She turned around. Yes, this way? This was the right direction, right? She just--

There was pressure on her elbow. “Alex.”

She stopped and turned. It was Megann.

“Are you all right?” Megann asked. 

Alex wanted to say no, that she was not all right, but she couldn’t find the words. Couldn’t figure out how to make sounds.

Megann, stoic Megann, pulled her into a tight, strong hug.

Alex fell into her. She wanted to sob. The desire was there, under her heart, pressing at her lungs. But she couldn't figure out how to do it. Her body felt stiff, constrained, like she’d been closed in an invisible iron maiden that kept her arms at her sides and her head up straight.

She was numb.

Megann drew her back into the alley, and they sat like they’d sat all those months ago after Alex had seen Maggie kissing someone. Megann watched for new arrivals, checking the occasional password and then letting people in. 

They didn’t talk. Megann just sat there with Alex for hours so she wouldn’t have to be alone.

It was late, deep in the thick of night, when Alex asked Megann to call her a car.

Megann squeezed her shoulder and headed back into the bar, and then re-emerged a few minutes later. “Driver’s on his way,” she said. She held out a hand and Alex took it, accepting the pull to her feet. “I’ll wait with you.”

The tungsten lights felt different now, sharp and metallic, like vinegar. Like acid. Nothing like the way they’d made Maggie glow.

“Vasquez loves you,” Alex said as, several blocks away, a familiar car turned onto the road. Her voice was stiff and stilted, just like the rest of her.

Megann smiled a little. “And I love her.”

“No, she _loves_ you,” Alex said. “She’s in love with you.”

The smile dropped. Megann’s eyes went wide. She seemed angry, or maybe frightened. “Did she tell you that?”

“No, but I can tell. And I think you love her, too. Don’t you?”

Megann’s silence spoke volumes.

Al’s car pulled up at the curb.

“I know it would be a risk,” Alex said. “You have a lot on the line together. But I think two people who love each other should be together.”

Al had climbed out of the car and opened the rear door. Alex sat down inside, but held out her hand, keeping him from closing it yet. “Think about it.”

That night, Alex got into her bed and sobbed until she felt like she’d dissolved, like the Wicked Witch of the West, a pillar of salt.

The next morning she woke up. She bathed and did her hair and makeup so that by the time she’d left her room, she was presentable for the day.

She called Kara and made plans for dinner.

She would become who she was before Maggie, she decided. She could be that girl again, famous and desirable and devoid of secrets. She could be who she was back before she met Maggie and fell in love.

The old Alex, desired and desirable, being seen at all the right parties and on the arm of all the right men. She would forget she’d ever been to a lesbian speakeasy. She would forget that it had become a second home for her, over in that other, strange neighbourhood where she never had reason to spend time.

With care and practice, she could be normal again.

So that’s what she’d do.

\--

As Alex’s relationship with Maggie receded into the past, the details of it receded, too, the less-significant moments retreating into the dark, making space for newer experiences, newer memories.

But not everything faded, of course.

There was an afternoon that Alex remembered with vivid clarity. She wasn’t sure why, exactly. It hadn’t been a moment of great passion. There had been no declarations of love, no profound acts of intimacy.

It had played out like this:  
  
Alex, sitting on the sofa in Maggie’s living room. Maggie had asked her to review a contract she’d been offered from MGM, because she’d never worked for them before. 

Jonn had taught Alex to read a contract early in her career. “I’ll never send you anything I’m not comfortable having you sign,” he said, “but you should always read them anyway, because you’re the one who has to live with the terms.” 

It was a weekend, a Saturday or a Sunday, and Alex had slept there the night before. She heard Maggie approach her from behind, the floor creaking under the thick carpet. Maggie stopped behind her and bent down; instinctively, without taking her eyes from the page, Alex tipped her chin up just enough to receive the kiss Maggie dropped onto her forehead.

“I brought you more coffee,” Maggie said, walking around the arm of the sofa. She placed a mug on the coffee table where Alex could reach it, and then sat down beside Alex, their thighs touching through their trousers, and blew on her own cup. “How does it look?”

“It’s all fairly standard so far, no different from what I’ve signed with MGM in the past,” Alex replied. She leaned forward to reach for the mug, and when she sat back again she nestled herself into Maggie’s side, angled so they could both see the pages. “There’s still a little more to review. Five minutes?”

“Sure.”

Alex stayed like that, half-leaning into Maggie’s side, while she finished reading the contract and confirmed that she couldn’t see anything unusual about it. “You might want to ask for a rider to make sure craft services always has a meal option without any milk in it.”

Maggie chuckled quietly. “Good thinking. That’s in everyone’s best interest.”

Alex hummed, smiling, then turned her head for a quick kiss. When she pulled back, Maggie’s expression had changed. She couldn’t put her finger on what it was: something in her eyes, or the corners of her mouth.

“Penny for your thoughts?” Alex asked.

Maggie smiled. A stray hair had come loose from Alex’s styling; Maggie tucked it back into place, her eyes drifting to follow her fingers. “I’m thinking about how much better off I’d have been if I’d had someone like you when I first got to Hollywood.”

She’d come to Hollywood at fourteen, Alex knew, after her parents had read her diary and reacted with violence and the threat of exorcism. In those early years, she’d been vastly underpaid for her work, a victim of predatory agents and predatory studios, until she worked on a set with Winn Schott who had gotten her set up with her first real agent. 

“Nobody should have gone through what you went through,” Alex had replied.

Maggie had just smiled, her eyes sad and hopeful and beautiful, and had tucked herself forward, pressing her lips and her nose to the crown of Alex’s head.

\--

When Alex decided to start being normal again, it meant spending a lot of time with Kara. 

“I’ve missed you!” she said, when they met for lunch at a café on Rodeo Drive. “You’ve never wanted to see me. I was worried maybe I’d done something wrong.”

“No, no, you haven’t done anything wrong,” Alex said, smoothing her skirt over her lap. “It’s just been… I’ve had a lot do deal with these past few months.”

“Since that article, I know,” Kara said, nodding, her face kind. “How’s Maggie doing?”

Alex’s stomach clenched. She sipped her water to force it to relax, and then shrugged and said, “She’s well, as far as I know.”

Kara frowned sympathetically. “That’s the worst thing in all of this, isn’t it? What it can do to a friendship.”

“Yes,”Alex said. Her fist had clenched around the fabric of her skirt in her lap. She stretched her fingers open and then laid her palm flat on her thigh, clammy skin against stiff linen. “That’s the worst thing.”

For a moment, Kara was quiet, and Alex avoided her gaze.

“Well, anyway, like we predicted, everyone seems to have forgotten about it with the way the news changes so fast these days,” Kara said, her voice noticeably lighter. She was forcing a change of subject and with it a change of mood, and for that, Alex was grateful “Did you see they called Pete Seeger in front of HUAC?”

How strange it was that talking about HUAC and McCarthy and the impending, precipitous collapse of American democracy was a relief from dancing along the edge of Alex’s personal life. 

Alex tumbled from one film right into the next. She threw herself into it, trying to convince herself she cared about it. She played a schoolteacher who found herself caught between the machinations of the mafioso father of one of her students and the ruthless FBI chief trying to catch him. Her character was a war widow, so there was no romantic storyline -- something that Alex appreciated -- but there were moments that passed between her character and the child’s mother, a victim in her own right who wanted what was best for her son, that Alex felt could be construed that way. 

She could imagine a different ending where the teacher and the mother rode the train together into the sunset, the boy tucked safe between them, in quest of a better life.

Instead, the mother took the child away herself after the death of the mafioso, and the movie closed on a coy exchange of smiles between Alex and the junior FBI agent who had reined in his boss’s Ishmael-like obsession throughout the story.

The junior FBI agent had been played by Winn Schott, the kind, handsome actor who had so often escorted Maggie to red carpets and other events. They’d spent time together in that context. Winn knew who she and Maggie had been to each other.  
  
But he was kind enough not to mention it. 

There were dinners with Kara, the occasional trip down to Midvale to visit their mother, and nights spent alone in a king-sized bed. 

It was… good.

It felt good not to feel like she was keeping any secrets, because the things in her mind -- her love for Maggie, her love for women -- were just in her mind; everyone thought things they had to keep to themselves. There were no longer any behaviours she had to conceal. Even in the world as it was, there were no thought crimes if those thoughts weren’t paired with actions.

Jonn was kind enough, and intuitive enough, not to suggest that she be seen out with any particular men. He hadn’t suggested it in a long time. She brought Kara to a few premieres, and her mother to one. She brought Jonn himself to two different premieres, which elicited the kind of tabloid gossip that she could more easily handle. No, she was not romantically involved with Jonn; he was a dear friend who had been like a father to her since her own father had passed away. No, she wouldn’t hide it if she _were_ romantically involved with Jonn, because yes, she believed quite strongly that nobody had any business telling two adults whether or not it was acceptable for them to love each other.

It helped her feel like she was principled, rather than a black hole of secrecy and fraud.

Weeks passed this way, with the regularity and boredom of a metronome without music.

And then, one Thursday afternoon, Alex got a phone call from Kara.

“Have you spoken to Maggie?” Kara asked, her voice almost frantic.

Alex hadn’t laid eyes on Maggie in three months. “No, why?”

“Oh, Alex, haven’t you heard? It’s all over the newswires.”

Thick, dense cold seeped into Alex’s bones, pushing out through her flesh. “What’s all over the newswires?”

“Someone named her.”

Alex’s heart stopped.

“Someone tabbed her for a communist, Alex. She has to testify in front of HUAC.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Greta Garbo never married, but she had sexual relationships with men and women in her life. We don't know whether she was bisexual or gay (in the 50s, relationships with men didn't necessarily mean you were attracted to them), but she definitely wasn't straight. Some personal correspondence made public after her death suggests she spent years loving Mimi Pollack, an actress with whom she had attended drama school in Sweden in the 1920s. It's not clear whether that love was ever requited. She quit Hollywood and acting in 1941, age 36, and spent the rest of her life as a notorious recluse relentlessly hounded by tabloids and gossip-mongers.
> 
> Ma Rainey was a successful blues singer who was openly bisexual and sang often about her love for women. There was a vibrant Black queer blues scene in the 1920s; ironically, they were largely ignored by law enforcement, perhaps because they were viewed as too marginal and unimportant to be worth arresting over songs and activities that mostly stayed in their own circles. That said, Rainey herself was arrested once for hosting a party of all women that the police called an orgy, though there's no consensus about whether that's actually what it was; the song quoted in this chapter, "Prove It On Me Blues," is one she wrote about her arrest, but it's also romantic and defiant and wonderful. Check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRyaUcVfhak


	4. Part 4

The House Un-American Activities Committee had been on its witch-hunt for years, now, trying to beat communists out of hiding.

Especially in Hollywood.

If your name showed up on a list of Communist Party meeting attendees, or if anyone assumed to be a Communist named you as a comrade, you had no recourse. The only way to save yourself was to rat out someone else to prove your American allegiances.

The alternative, in Hollywood, was blacklisting: the sudden and complete decimation of your career. 

And now Maggie would have to face that tribunal.

The phone fell from Alex’s hand, clattering against the wall before pulling to the bottom of its coiled wire and hanging there, dangling like a spider.

“Alex? Alex?” Kara’s voice was thin and tinny through the receiver, so far away.

Alex bent to grasp the receiver and then she stayed low, dropping to her knees on the kitchen tile. “When did this come out?”

“Just this morning. Alex, are you okay?”

She was okay, wasn’t she? It wasn’t her career on the line.

“I need to call her,” she said.

“Okay, but Alex, she probably won’t--”

Alex stood up and pressed her fingers to the cradle, ending the call. 

Then she dialled the number she knew by heart.

On her first try, she got a busy signal. 

She forced herself to wait a full sixty seconds before trying again, to get another busy signal.

And again, five minutes later.

A half an hour later, the phone rang and rang and rang and rang, and that’s all that happened. 

Alex’s own phone rang a few times during all of this. Every time, she picked up the receiver and slammed it down. She didn’t want to talk to anybody. She didn’t want anybody else interfering with her ability to get ahold of Maggie.

Two hours later, her doorbell ran, jolting her out of what felt like a stupor, dazed and exhausted. She stood mechanically, taking a few steps toward the door almost on reflex, before she realized she didn’t care who was there. She needed to talk to Maggie. She needed to know that Maggie was all right.

The doorbell rang again, and she ignored it this time.

But a moment later, a voice called to her.

“Alex!” Then, an impatient knock. “Alex! I know you’re in there!”

It was Kara. 

Alex didn’t want to see Kara. She didn’t want to see anyone. She stumbled back to the wall and slid down until she was sitting on the thick carpet of the living room, staring vacantly toward the door.

There was the sound of a key in the lock, the sharp clicking of the door opening. Because of course, Kara had a copy of Alex’s key.

“That’s for emergencies,” Alex said, when the door opened.

Kara closed the door behind her and rushed forward to crouch near where Alex was sitting. She laid a hand on Alex’s forehead, as though checking for a fever, and the other hand on her neck, as though checking for a pulse. “Look at you. I think this counts.” 

Her voice was soft and kind and it made Alex want to cry or scream or break something.

She settled for numb, stony silence.

“Come,” Kara said, grasping Alex’s elbow and urging her to her feet. Alex didn’t resist when Kara guided her over to the sofa. 

“What’s going on?” Kara asked. “You sounded panicked on the phone when I told you.”

“I’m worried about Maggie.” It was the truth.

“I know you are.”

“She could lose everything. This whole career she’s scraped for her entire life.”

Kara sighed. “Alex, I don’t think--”

“You don’t know, Kara. Nobody knows the truth about her. She has no family. She came here with nothing and built everything she has, and I’m the only one who knows. Nobody knows but me, and I have to call her--”

“I know,” Kara said, interrupting Alex’s rambling. “I know you want to call her. That’s what I was trying to tell you on the phone. I’m sure she’s not answering her phone. Any half-decent lawyer would have told her that. Or even her agent, if she doesn’t have a lawyer yet.”

Alex pressed her hands together, knitting her fingers. Kara was right: she did know this. When all this mess had started to take off back in the late 40s, Jonn had asked her into his office and grilled her on her connections and whether she could ever end up on the wrong side of McCarthy. 

“I’m not judging,” he’d said, “I can certainly see the appeal of many dimensions of communist ideology. But I want to know now if this is something we need to be prepared for.”

“It shouldn’t be,” Alex had replied. “I mean, I can’t vouch for where all my friends and exes have been in every moment of their lives, but I’m not a communist. You know me, I’m not very political at all.” 

His expression, at the time, had been inscrutable to her.

Now, thinking back, she recognized it as a conflicted combination of relief and disappointment. He wanted her safe, of course, but he wished she were political, too.

If only he knew that she’d spent months and months visiting a lesbian speakeasy where she was, more often than not, the only white person in the room. And now, here she was, trying to figure out how she could help the woman she loved to escape becoming the latest casualty of the country’s worst witch-hunt since Salem.

Something touched her face. It was Kara’s fingers, touching her jaw, trying to draw Alex back to the moment, out of her memories.

“Alex,” Kara said, and there was something inscrutable in her voice. Tentative.

This was unusual. Kara was always so confident, so assertive, but she looked nervous now, her eyes kind, always kind, but uncertain.  
  
“Yes?” Alex replied.

“This… this isn’t because she could name you, is it? Have you ever been to a communist meeting?”

Alex shook her head. “No. Of course not.” 

Kara’s expression didn’t change. She had clearly expected that answer, and had something else on her mind. Her hands dropped to Alex’s and she held them tightly, as though she were afraid Alex might run away if given the chance.

“That story about you and Maggie,” she said. “The one in _Confidential_.”

Alex’s mouth went dry. Her palms went clammy in Kara’s grip. 

“Was it true?”

Kara didn’t look angry, she didn’t look disgusted, but Alex’s heart began to race, pounding in her chest like a drum. Her whole body felt cold and hot, feverish, and her hands began to tremble in time with the rapid patter of her heart. 

“It’s all right if it was true,” Kara said, her voice gentle, so gentle. “I won’t be upset.”

A thickness in Alex’s throat. Tears rose in her eyes. She gripped Kara’s fingers, every muscle in her arms going tight in the effort to keep them still when they wanted to shake and rattle as though she were having a fit. “It… I…”

Words were elusive. She couldn’t make herself speak the truth of it.

But Kara understood anyway.

It was all too much, with Maggie in trouble and Alex feeling more alone in these past weeks than she had ever felt before.  
  
She nodded, the closest she could come to affirming the truth of Kara’s guess. 

Immediately, Kara drew her in, and she was wrapped in her sister’s strong arms. “Oh, Alex,” she said, a gentle croon, and then she was rocking them both as though she were the older sister, while Alex, catatonic, just tried to keep breathing. “Oh, Alex, I’m so sorry,” Kara murmured. “I’m so sorry and I love you. I’m so sorry, and I love you, and it’s going to be okay.” 

Alex, overwhelmed and exhausted and terrified, clutched at Kara’s elbows and suddenly began to sob.

They stayed like that for a long time, until Alex had no tears left and Kara’s cardigan was completely ruined. It was messy and miserable and cathartic; Alex felt like she’d purged something ugly, a disease of secrecy trying to eat her from the inside.

When she’d gone quiet, they both sat up, and Kara handed her a handkerchief from her purse.

“So,” she said, “tell me more about this woman who has your heart.”

\--

They talked long into the evening. Alex told Kara about Maggie, about their life together, about the secrecy and the way that _Confidential_ had done them in, and how she had never managed to recover since that box of her belongings had arrived with the daily mail.

She told her about the speakeasy, about Vasquez and Megann and Al’s drivers.

Somewhere in there, Kara went to the kitchen and made them tea. By the time the story was done, their mugs were empty and cold, and they sat near each other at one corner of the kitchen table. Alex felt spent, and she felt cleansed.

Kara leaned forward, bracing her forearms on the table, and let a breath out slowly.

“I have two things to say about all this,” she said.

Alex waited.

“The first is that I’m sorry I never got to know the two of you together. I’m sorry I made you feel like you had to hide this from me.”

It was almost enough to start Alex crying again.

“The second is that I can’t imagine she wouldn’t want to hear from you right now.”

More settled now, Alex could think more clearly. She couldn’t go to Maggie’s house -- there would be photographers and journalists camped outside. Maggie wasn’t working right now, she knew that too, so there was no tracking her down at any of the studios.

There was one place she might go. Or, if she didn’t, where someone might know how to find her.

That night, Alex had no energy to go to south Central. She was exhausted, and even if she’d pulled herself together to go to the bar, she wouldn’t have known what to say.

Kara spent the night in Alex’s guest bedroom and left the next day after breakfast. She hugged Alex tightly before she left, and whispered fiercely that she loved her no matter what, and that Alex should call her when she managed to get ahold of Maggie.

That day, she met Jonn for lunch in Beverly Hills, where she discussed everything with him and got his blessing for what she wanted to do. 

In the afternoon, she drove herself to Burbank instead of booking a driver. A pass down Maggie’s cross-street revealed a cluster of photographers camped near the front door, and Alex didn’t care who saw her anymore, didn’t care for her own sake if being photographed at Maggie’s front door would start a new round of rumours, but she didn’t want to do anything that might draw more attention to Maggie than she was already getting. She parked a block away and cut between two houses to sneak up to Maggie’s place from the back, but the car was gone and even the back curtains were drawn, though there were no photographers back here.

Maggie wasn’t home. 

There was only one other place Alex knew to look.

That night, she called Al and, for the first time, asked him to pick her up at home instead of at the USC campus.

“Long time, no see,” he said, smiling as he held the rear door open for her.

“It’s been a strange few weeks,” Alex replied, “but I’m back now.”

And for the first time in three months, she went to Vasquez and Megann’s bar.

\--

The day had been foggy, unusual but not unheard of in August. In the evening, though, the fog thickened into something darker and more foreboding, blotting out the stars as they emerged. But with the darkness and the cloud came relief from the brutal August heat. 

Alex paid Al and tipped him more than she’d ever tipped him before. Then she made her way down the dark alley to where Megann had propped the bar door open, probably to let the cool air in.

Alex hadn’t been to the bar all summer. She could only imagine how hot it must have grown.

When Megann saw Alex, she narrowed her eyes.

“It’s been awhile,” she said, her tone perfectly neutral.

“Yes, I know,” Alex replied. “It’s been a difficult summer.”

“I bet.” 

Megann looked at Alex through narrowed eyes, and Alex felt scrutinized, as though she were under a microscope, and wanted to squirm like a pinned insect.

“I’m sorry,” Alex finally said, “I don’t know the current password.”

“I know you don’t,” Megann said, and there was no mistaking the harshness there now.

“Listen,” Alex said, trying to keep her tone placating, “I know I’ve been gone for a long time. I don’t want to cause any trouble, but I really need to talk to Maggie if she’s here.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Megann stiffened, her tone unmistakably angry now. “Maggie doesn’t need you piling onto her troubles today.”

“No! No, I know,” Alex said, holding a hand out flat as though to push back the very idea that she might want to upset Maggie. “I want to help. I might be the only person who can help. But she won’t answer her phone.”

Megann softened a little at that, her jaw unclenching, but still, she said, “This isn’t a place where people come if they want to be found by anyone who isn’t here already.”

The implication was clear, and it was devastating. Alex ducked her head under the weight of the blow.

“I deserve that,” she said. “And I just… I needed some time. I wasn’t ready, even when I thought I was. But I am now. I know who I am.” She met Megann’s eye squarely, forcing herself to confront the reluctance there, and the hesitation. “I want to be here,” she said, with as much confidence as she could find.

Megann peered at her for a long moment, that scrutinous gaze, before she nodded and stepped back from the doorway, leaving room for Alex to pass. 

“The password’s ‘solidarity,’” she said.

The tension finally left Alex’s shoulders. “Thank you,” she said as she stepped past, but Megann wasn’t finished.

“Maggie’s not the only person you need to talk to.”

Alex paused two steps down from the top and looked back up. Megann’s eyebrow was cocked. She didn’t need to say anything else.

Alex nodded.

The basement was hot, even with the door open. There were three electric fans, two in the far corners and one near the bar, their motors loud enough to drown out any music that might have come from the jukebox. It was as busy as it would be on an average evening, perhaps fifteen women sitting at various tables, some in dresses, others in stylish trousers, and still others looking handsome in menswear. She scanned the room for Maggie’s small frame and platinum hair, but there were only two blondes in the room and neither was her.

She wondered why Megann had been so worried that Alex might upset Maggie here when Maggie wasn’t here.

The hour was still early, though. And she was here, so she might as well stay for a drink.

She turned to the bar. Vasquez was stacking glasses, her gaze fixed downward with obvious determination.

The seat at the end of the bar, Alex’s usual seat, was empty.

She went to it.

Vasquez dutifully walked over. 

“We’ve stopped stocking Glenfiddich,” she said.

Alex folded her hands and rested them on the edge of the bartop, leaning in. “Then I’ll take whatever whiskey you have.”

Vasquez tipped her head in acknowledgement and then pulled a bottle from the shelf behind her. Alex didn’t recognize it, and it smelled vaguely of turpentine when Vasquez set it before her. It tasted like turpentine, too, but she kept her face straight when she sipped it.

Alex wouldn’t have blamed Vasquez for turning on her heel and busying herself with something on the far end of the bar. But she didn’t. She leaned against the back counter, just like she’d done so many times before.

“It’s been awhile,” she said.

Right to the chase, then.

An advantage to the turpentine whiskey was that it was easy for Alex to resist the impulse to down it all at once. 

This was far from the first time Alex had stayed away for long periods. She almost never came when she was filming. But she’d always told Vasquez about the times she’d be away. She said goodbye before she left.

But three months ago, Alex had just walked out the door and not come back.

“I’m sorry,” Alex said. She wished Vasquez were angry. She could deal with anger; she could placate it, she could grovel before it. 

Vasquez didn’t look angry. She looked sad, her arms crossed tightly over her chest, one thumb picking at the opposite sleeve garter.

“Can I ask you something?”

Alex nodded. “Anything.”

“Were we friends?”

Whatever she had been expecting, that wasn’t it. 

Alex’s mouth dropped open, momentarily speechless, so Vasquez continued. “Because I thought we were really friends, but then you stopped coming, and you never got in touch, so I started wondering if I was just stupid to think Alexis D’Anvers would really be friends with a Puerto Rican dyke like--”

“Stop,” Alex blurted, spreading her palms flat on the bar. “Vas, please, stop.”

Vasquez’s jaw snapped shut.

“You are one of the most important friends I’ve ever had,” Alex said. “And I’m sorry I left. I was...” She’d been about to say heartbroken, but that wasn’t it. Or it wasn’t the most important part. 

Heartbreak had driven her away, but something else had kept her away.

“I was scared,” she said. “And tired. I gave up on being myself. I tried to go back to being someone else for awhile.”

Vasquez leaned forward, resting her fists on the bartop so they could more easily talk over the din of the fans. “Who are you now?

Alex held a hand out, palm up, and waved it a little, gesturing toward the room, toward Vasquez, the discrete staircase, the blues songs with their hidden messages. “I’m here,” she said. “And I’m sorry, Vas. I really am. We were friends. I hope we still are.”

Vasquez eyed her for a minute, as though she were appraising a stone, trying to decide whether it were a diamond or a crystal.

And then, without a word, she swiped Alex’s glass of turpentine whiskey and dumped it in the sink.

Alex felt her heart sink.

But then Vasquez ducked below the bar, re-emerging with a grin and a half-full bottle of Glenfiddich.

“I stashed this when we ran low,” she said. “Just in case you came back.”

She served Alex a strong pour, and the taste of it, smooth over tang of cheap ethanol on the back of Alex’s throat, warmed her in ways that had nothing to do with the August heat.

“So,” Vasquez said, “I’m guessing it’s not a coincidence you came back today.”

Alex nodded. “I do want to speak to Maggie. Do you know if she’s coming tonight?”  
  
Vasquez froze, brow furrowed, and then grinned that rakish grin that Alex had missed more than she realized. “I guess you haven’t seen her in awhile.”

“No,” Alex said, “not since I was last here, but--”

But Vasquez was shaking her head a little, chuckling, and then she gestured with her chin toward a far corner. “She’s here.”

Alex furrowed her brow and turned to scan the room, but there were still only two blondes, one too tall to be Maggie, the other too curvy.

“Over there,” Vasquez said, “near the jukebox. Her back is to you.”

It was quite sudden, as though her eyes had just found their focus. Like she’d put on a pair of invisible glasses.

There, in the corner, her back half to the wall, and half to the bar. She wore a men’s suit unlike Alex had ever seen on her before, with a vest and a tie and a fitted shirt like Vasquez might wear. And her hair was black, not blonde.

But still: it was Maggie.

\--

Nothing about Maggie aligned with what Alex had expected. 

There was the hair, of course; dyed back to its natural colour. The clothing, too; a fashion she had alluded to before, with her cravats and her tapered slacks and her boyish loafers and lace-up flats, but that she’d never committed to so fully, with the tie and the waistcoat and the trousers that fell loose and straight from her hips. Her hair was gathered at the back of her neck and then hung long and loose down her back. And there, on the table beside her -- was that a fedora?

Just as striking was her demeanour. Alex had imagined she would be jittery with stress, or perhaps drowning her fears into a drink. Instead, she was smiling, laughing with a group of friends gathered around her table.

But no, there -- Alex had spent too much time reading the minutiae of Maggie’s movements, of her expressions, of her body. Her grip around her beer bottle was a little too tight. And there, in moments between peals of laughter or comments offered to her friends, her smiles fell too quickly. The corners of her eyes looked tense.

Alex watched for a minute, and then another, trying to decide how to approach. The last time she’d been in this room, she had walked up to Maggie and drawn her away from her friends and offered her her heart.

She didn’t want to walk up and draw her away again, if she could help it.

But in the end, she didn’t have to.

Maggie finished her beer and turned to look at the bar, perhaps planning her next order, and caught Alex’s eyes immediately, as though her gaze had been drawn there. 

Alex smiled and then, without thinking, lifted a hand and waved -- an action that filled her with embarrassment as soon as her brain caught up to her actions.

But Maggie just smiled. She turned and said something to her friends at the table, and then picked up her hat (it was, indeed, a fedora) and, with a stride longer, more solid than Alex was used to, approached Alex at the bar.

She set the hat on the bartop. “Hi, Alex.”

Alex swallowed. She wanted to run her hands over Maggie’s body, like Megann had done when Vasquez had been hurt, to make sure she was okay. It wasn’t rational. Maggie hadn’t been injured. But she’d been hurt. She was under threat. And every atom in Alex’s body wanted to make sure she was safe.

“Hi,” she said. Then, because the easiest way to kick an elephant out of the room was to speak to it directly, she waved a hand, gesturing at Maggie’s hair and clothes. “You look amazing.” 

Maggie smiled shyly and looked down, running a palm over her hair, catching a few flyaway strands. “You really think so?”

“I do,” Alex said, not only because nothing Maggie could do would possibly make her less beautiful. “You look… right.” 

“Thank you,” Maggie replied. “That means a lot, coming from you.”

Alex’s heart clenched.

“The suit’s just for fun,” Maggie went on. Her eyes flitted up to Alex’s and then darted away, as though she were nervous about something. “This isn’t me all the time, not like Vas. But I like it.”

“It doesn’t have to be right all the time to be right some of the time.” Alex knit her fingers together, pressing a thumb into the opposite palm to tamp down the urge to touch. The heat felt almost stifling, sweat gathering at the base of her neck and dripping down her spine, and she wondered how on earth Maggie was surviving under all those layers.

“Listen, Maggie,” Alex said, and Maggie looked up at her, eyes dark and sharp as always. “I came here hoping to find you.” 

Maggie chuckled a little. It sounded more like harsh breathing than laughter, lost into the sound of the fans. She bent forward, bracing her elbows on the bartop and dipping her head low, as though to duck out from under the topic.

“I’m all right,” she said. “I’m actually happy to see you, you know. So I can tell you in person.”

Alex perched on the stool she’d abandoned behind her, bringing herself closer to Maggie’s stooped level. “Tell me what?”

“That I’m leaving.”

“What--leaving?” Alex sputtered. “When? Where will you go?”

“When I go to DC, I probably won’t come back. But I’m not sure where I’ll go. Maybe New York.”

Alex shook her head. She had assumed that Maggie was expecting to be blacklisted. She hadn’t expected to hear that she planned to roll over like this, though. After all she’d done, after how hard she’d worked to build herself up from a penniless, homeless teenage girl with her wit and a dream. 

She could live in New York and work in Hollywood, of course. Plenty of people did.

But Alex could tell that wasn’t what Maggie intended. 

“This is absurd,” Alex pressed. “You’re not even a communist.”

Maggie scoffed. “I’m not _not_ a communist, either. They got my name fair and square. I went to a meeting. I don’t regret it. I’d heard they wanted better things for people like me.” She raised an eyebrow and then said, pointedly, “for people like _us._ ”

“Yes, I know, you went to one meeting. And I know what you thought of it, too.”

She’d thought it had been a club of comfortable white men flaunting an obsequious devotion to radical principles with no real understanding of the oppression they claimed to abhor. Those had been Maggie’s precise words. Alex remembered them clearly.

“It doesn’t matter,” Maggie said. “You know that. The industry’s done with me. It’s time to move on.” She began to straighten up, pulling her hat toward her by the brim.

That was how Alex stopped her: by slamming her hand down on the edge of the fedora, and she made the offer she had come here to make. “Name me.”

Maggie froze, and then looked up at Alex, eyes incredulous. “What?”  
  
“To keep yourself off the blacklist, all you have to do is give someone up. So name me.”

Maggie was shaking her head before Alex finished speaking. “You’re not a communist.”

“Do you think they care? I’m Jewish. I abhor segregation and I have a very public friendship with Jonn Jones. My father was a mentor to Trumbo. The tabloids said I was your lover. Name me. They’ll buy it.”

“Alex--”

“You’ve worked too hard for this, Maggie,” Alex insisted. She was on fire now, convinced that she was right, convinced that this was the best solution. “You built everything you have, everything you are, all by yourself, from nothing, and I can’t stand by and watch it all get taken from you for a cockamamie reason like this. Not when I can do something about it.”

For a long moment, Maggie stood dumbstruck. Her mouth barely moved, any sounds she made lost in the din of the room. Finally she inhaled, preparing to say something, and Alex realized she didn’t want to hear what would come next. She didn’t want to hear the excuses Maggie would certainly give for why she wouldn’t do it; she didn’t want to hear the reasons why even now, even for something like this, Maggie would refuse to let her principles slide in favour of her own self-interest.

So Alex motored onward, choking out the space for Maggie to argue. “I’ve been handed everything, and nobody’s ever handed you a damn thing. So let me give you this. Please, Maggie, let me give you this.”

Let me give you my career, and my good name, if it means you can keep your own.

And then, to stifle any final attempt at rebuttal, Alex picked up her purse and strode toward the stairs, leaving Maggie behind by the bar, holding her hat in her hands.

\--

By the time she’d climbed the stairs, Alex realized she hadn’t paid for her drink. She paused at the top, where Megann was standing, and handed her a few bills to cover her tab.

“It’s looking ominous out there,” Megann said, her eyes cast toward the sky. “Do you want to wait here until your driver arrives?”

But of course, Alex hadn’t even paused long enough to ask someone to call her a car. And she didn’t want to go back downstairs to risk re-opening the gates of conversation with Maggie, so she’d have to walk out to Central Avenue and try to hail a cab.

“It’s all right,” Alex said. “It’ll be nice to cool off.”

Megann pursed her lips, and then she smiled. “Suit yourself.”

“I’ll see you again soon,” Alex said, and could tell in Megann’s eyes that she knew that she meant it. 

The air was cool, a striking change from the muggy basement that trapped the heat from earlier in the day. Alex had been sweating so she wrapped her arms around herself, warding against a chill, and set off under the amber streetlights toward the main road. She felt unburdened, her chest light and feet quick, buoyed by the unusual, firm conviction that she had done the right thing for someone else. She had rarely known, before, how good sacrifice could feel.

She hoped Maggie would take her offer. Tomorrow, Jonn would call Sam to encourage it.

A half a block from the bar, and still three more to Central, Alex felt her first raindrop, a cool speck on her scalp. Then there were more, and more still, and suddenly she was caught in a freak dousing of rain, an uncommon August downpour.

The noise of the water hitting the pavement, the speed of it gathering in the gutters, drowned out the sound of footsteps rushing up behind her, so she was completely caught off-guard when a hand curled around her elbow and pulled.

She wheeled, hands up and prepared to defend herself, but it was only Maggie, beads of rain gathering along the edge of the brim of her fedora. Hands up, Maggie stepped back, until Alex’s fists unclenched and her hands fell to her side again.

For several long breaths, Maggie just stood there, looking at Alex with her wide, dark eyes, and Alex was reminded of the ways that Maggie had looked at her before, in what had come to feel like a past life. It recalled Alex to a moment that had, at the time, felt private and cozy, protecting them from the outside world. When Alex thought about it now, she still remembered the warmth, and the coziness, but also a kind of loneliness, a realization that the walls around them had stood to keep others out more than to ensconce them inside. 

It had been as much an isolation cell as it had been a cocoon.

Maggie knitted her fingers together, her expression turning nervous, and said, “You can’t just say what you said and then walk away.”  
  
Her voice blended with the rain, and it made the moment feel more intimate, more private than it should have out here on a sidewalk like this. For once, Alex wasn’t nervous or self-conscious. “I didn’t want you to waste your breath trying to talk me out of it.”

“You don’t really think I would do you dirty like that, do you?”

“I hope you will.” Alex smiled. “I’m asking you to.”

Maggie shook her head and glanced behind her, as though she thought this were some kind of a trap. As though she thought someone were about to jump out from behind a building and yell _Surprise! We fooled you!_

But it wasn’t a trap.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

Alex opened her mouth to reply, but Maggie raised a hand to stop her, shaking her head. “Last year, you were so worried about your image and your career that you put me on ice. What changed?”

Words were hard to find. The feelings she’d had over these past few months had twisted and changed so many times she couldn’t figure out how to express them. Her compass didn’t point north anymore. 

“I’ve seen my name in lights more times than I can count,” Alex said. “My face printed large on so many posters. But a poster is just paper. It burns hot for a moment, and then it’s gone, leaving me cold.”

Maggie was softening. Her hands wound more tightly around each other, nestled into her chest, and the brim of her hat was beginning to wilt under the rainfall. 

“I’m tired of the cold,” Alex said. “I don’t want it anymore. So I might as well give it up for a good reason.”

Clenched fingers untangled slowly, and Maggie pointed to herself, as if to make sure. “I’m the good reason,” she said, like she couldn’t quite believe it.

And Alex couldn’t help herself, she moved closer, just half a step before catching herself. “You’re the best reason,” she said. 

They stood still for a long moment. Alex hadn’t wanted to have this conversation, but now that it had started, she didn’t know how to end it. She was getting soaked, and wondered if she could ask Maggie to have Megann or Vas call Al for her after all. 

“What about me?” Maggie asked, suddenly.

Alex furrowed her brow, confused. “What about you?”

“Do you want me anymore?”

Of all the directions the conversation could have gone, Alex hadn’t braced herself for that one. Maggie was done with her. She had made that quite clear, and Alex wasn’t interested in groveling for a love not freely given. Not even from Maggie.

But something about Maggie’s expression, the lilt of her voice, gave rise to a devastating inkling of hope.

“I respect your wishes,” Alex replied. “But I think I’ll always want you.”

“More than--” Maggie swallowed. “More than you want Hollywood?”  
  
This just felt cruel, now, this insistence that Alex restate things, that she make these hard things clearer. 

But it had been bad communication that had broken them in the first place.

“Yes,” Alex said. And then, even though Maggie hadn’t used this word, she said, “I love you more than I love Hollywood. I don’t think I love Hollywood at all, anymore.”

Maggie chewed on the corner of her lip, but her eyes stayed locked on Alex’s. Finally, she opened her mouth to speak again.  
  
“I’m finished in this business,” she said.

Frustrated, Alex said, “You don’t have to be, that’s what--”

“No, Alex,” Maggie interrupted. “I’m finished. My contracts are slowing down. I’m not getting scripts.”

Alex furrowed her brow. “What do you mean?”

Maggie shrugged, a gesture of hopelessness, not indecision. “Technicolor,” she said. “I’m not a face the studios want for Technicolor, and more and more pictures are getting made that way. I see the writing on the wall, Alex. It’s all going to be color pictures soon, and when that happens, I’ll be out of work.” 

It wasn’t something Alex had thought about. She’d done a few color pictures; everything in the past year or two had been in color. But everything Maggie had ever done had been in black and white.

A rage bubbled up inside her that anyone -- a studio director, a casting director, a makeup artist -- could ever see Maggie as anything other than the single most beautiful woman they’d ever laid eyes on.

“Christ,” she said, deflating.

Maggie nodded. “I won’t name you, Alex. It might buy me a year or two, but that’s not worth sacrificing your reputation.”

The rain was running down Alex’s spine, gathering in her shoes. She cast her eyes down, as though she could find answers in the growing puddles.

She couldn’t disagree with what Maggie was saying.

There was nothing she could do.

“But maybe there’s another way out of this for us,” Maggie said.

Alex lifted her eyes. “What is it?”

Maggie took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. She looked handsome in the suit, slight but strong, solid, even as her sleeves clung to her skin.

“You’d really walk away from Hollywood for me?” Maggie asked.

Alex nodded. 

Maggie swallowed. She wrapped her arms around herself, small and nervous again. “What if we walked away together?”

Alex’s heart stopped.

_Away, together._

Then it jerked to a start again, double-time, making her sway a little on her feet. “Together?”

Maggie took a step closer. “Yeah, Alex. Together.”

“I just--I want to make sure I understand,” Alex said, convinced she was confused about something, because Maggie couldn’t possibly mean--could she? “When you say together, you mean--”

“I mean like we were,” Maggie said. She took a step closer again. “Together. We could go to New York. Or somewhere completely different, like, I don’t know. Chicago. Baltimore. We could get a place together. Start a new life.”

Alex felt herself going tight, her body clenching around the hope in her chest, still not entirely sure this was real, or that perhaps Maggie wasn’t just asking for friendship. “How many bedrooms?”

“Two,” Maggie said, and Alex’s heart briefly fell. But Maggie went on, “But one’s just for show. Or maybe for guests.”

The images flashed before Alex’s eyes. A cottage somewhere, with rolling countryside, and the two of them sitting on a divan in the sun room, Maggie’s back to Alex’s chest, reading a book or listening to a record. Or something different, a penthouse in Manhattan, in a sunlit kitchen, Maggie trying to teach Alex how to roast a chicken.

“I don’t think you can have both me and Hollywood,” Maggie said. “I don’t think we both fit in your life. But--but you can choose me. If you want to.”

Alex let out a shuddering breath, her hands unclenching by her sides. “What do you want?”

“I want you,” Maggie said, without a moment’s hesitation. “I’ve always wanted you. I just didn’t think you had room for me in your life.”

Finally, all the spinning stopped. Her racing heart settled.

 _I want you_ , Maggie had said.

Through the rain, Alex stepped closer. She stepped closer again, until there was barely enough space for raindrops to fall between them, and Maggie didn’t step away

Then Alex lifted her hands and slowly, carefully, cradled Maggie’s jaw.

Maggie’s eyes dipped closed. She melted into the touch.

“I will always choose you,” Alex whispered, her heart so full it ached in her chest. “I’m so sorry I ever let you believe otherwise. But I will always cho--”

She was silenced by the press of Maggie’s lips.

The surprise of it froze Alex stiff, but Maggie stepped into her, the buttons of her vest pressing into the wet of Alex’s dress. But the scent of Maggie’s skin, still so familiar, and the press of her body, an echo of a past life, drew Alex out of her paralysis. She clutched Maggie’s jaw, then further back, her neck, weaving her fingers into the wet strands of hair as the tie fell out, and kissed her in earnest, turning her head and seeking, searching. They had never kissed outdoors like this, never kissed in the rain, but anyone who drove by would have mistaken Maggie for a man, dressed like this--a small one, but a man nonetheless, kissing his sweetheart under the streetlights.

Maggie gasped into Alex’s lips, a drowning woman finding air, and she clutched Alex closer. Clutched her like she needed her. Alex poured herself into it, into the kiss and the touch, as this one moment in the dark of night could, with enough effort, erase all the months they’d been apart. 

When they did part, they did so slowly, their lips drawn back together over and over again, starved of something they’d loved for so long.

The hat cast Maggie’s eyes in shadow. Alex tipped it back playfully.

“Hi,” she said.

Maggie grinned. “Hi.”

Alex kissed Maggie this time.

They stayed out there, in the rain, until Maggie’s hat became so waterlogged that it slipped off the back of her head and landed on the sidewalk. The wet thump of it made them laugh, and Maggie stepped back far enough to crouch down and pick it up, whacking it against her leg to shake off any dirt.

Then she looked at Alex, her eyes even brighter now without the fedora casting them in shadow. She looked at her with happiness, and with love, and Alex felt like a piece of herself had slotted back into place.

Alex held out a hand. Maggie took it.

“Come,” Alex said. “I’ll let you buy me a drink and introduce me to all of your friends, handsome.”

Maggie laughed and tugged Alex closer.

Leaning into each other like drunken lovers, arms around waists, they walked back to the bar. Megann raised her eyebrows at them, but smiled and stepped out of the doorway to let them in.

At the bottom of the stairs, Vasquez laughed and pelted each of them with a dry dish towel, crumpled up and thrown like a baseball. 

“Dry off, the two of you!” she exclaimed, “we don’t serve drowned rats in here.”

Alex patted her face, and wiped the water from her hair and arms, while Maggie shrugged out of her heavy jacket and loosened her tie and cuffs to let the air flow through. 

Then Maggie took Alex by the hand, and for the first time in all of her visits to this bar, Alex sat down at a table full of women.

It was lovely. Two of the women, Jane and Suzie, held hands under the table. Lila was there, too.

“Did you get the autograph?” Alex asked her.

Lila, still wide-eyed and a little starstruck, could only nod, and her friend beside her--Leticia--turned and gawped at her. “You got an autograph?!”

Maggie pulled her chair close to Alex and slipped an arm around her, drawing her in, like she couldn’t bear to have any space between them after so much time apart.

Alex sank into it, even like this, when they were both soggy and the room was stifling hot. 

It could be like this, she thought. Not everywhere. But now, here, in a place like this, she could be a girl with her sweetheart, sharing a drink with another girl and her sweetheart and a few other friends.

A movement caught Alex’s eye. Behind the bar, she saw Megann walk up to Vasquez, setting a hand on her shoulder. They talked about something quietly, and then Megann leaned forward, and Vasquez turned her head, and they kissed. It was just a little peck, like they’d done it a million times before, but Alex could see their shy, giddy smiles in the aftermath.

In her mind’s eye, Alex saw a towering column of cigarette smoke. Sad eyes, and a gently accented voice saying _I never wanted to be alone_.

“Hey,” Maggie said, shaking her hand a little from where they held each other under the table. “Did we lose you already?”

“No, I’m sorry,” Alex said. “I just got distracted for a minute.”

That night, after a drink or two and a kiss or two, after Alex had remembered what it was like to be surrounded by friends, she and Maggie climbed drunkenly into the back of Al’s car.

Drunkenly, but they weren’t drunk. Neither had had much, but the giddiness had them floating. Alex felt like her head was full of helium.

Maggie’s house was still blocked with reporters, they both assumed. So they went to Alex’s.

In the bedroom, Maggie reached for the buttons of her own shirt, but Alex swatted her hands away and began to undo them herself, her fingers made clumsy by the wet fabric. When she was done, Maggie stepped around her and kissed the base of her neck before she lowered the zipper of her dress.

Maggie was beautiful, so impossibly beautiful. Alex laid her hands on the hourglass swell of Maggie’s hips and drew her toward the bed.

They settled into the sheets, too tired and clammy to make love, but when they lay down together, Alex propped herself up on an elbow and looked down, pushing a loose strand of hair away from Maggie’s face.

“Is this happening?” Maggie whispered. “I’m so tired, I’m afraid I’m dreaming. I dreamed so many nights of being with you again, like this.”

Alex dipped and kissed her, and Maggie’s arms snaked around her, nails digging into her back with a desperation that made Alex realize that she hadn’t been alone in her longing and her loneliness.

“I’m here,” she breathed, their bodies so close they felt entangled, two parts of a single flame. “Every night, and every morning, I’ll be here with you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There will be an epilogue added.... whenever I get around to writing it. -Roadie
> 
> As a reminder, there is no separate post for the amazing art by @Viviwrites, so please share your thoughts on it here!


	5. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Do you know the difference between a secret and a lie?"

**THE SECRETS OF M.D. RODAS**

By Nia Nal

Autostrider

August 18th, 2009

\--

This is a story about secrets.

There are the small secrets, like the one I’ve been sitting on for four months, when I was contacted by my boss at _Autostrider_. We had been granted a massive exclusive--so massive, we were already budgeting to step up our hosting packages to keep the site from going down when it dropped. And our editor wanted me to write it.

I agreed, of course, and since then, I’ve been keeping secret the knowledge that acclaimed crime fiction novelist M.D. Rodas, notorious for her reclusion so extreme that nobody but her agent knows who she is, would be stepping out into the light. This announcement comes ahead of the release of _Follow Her_ , a film based on Rodas’s 1997 novel _Privacy_ , next month.

That secret was my secret. But I kept it to protect her secret. Ms. Rodas, it turns out, is no stranger to the public eye. At different points of her life, she has gone by different names, and her pen name is only the latest of those to have been known in every household in America. Each of these name changes has arisen from the need to separate her present from her past.

Like most _Autostrider_ readers, I’m not a stranger to keeping secrets. I kept myself secret for years, the truth of me, behind a haircut and a name and a face that didn’t match the way I saw myself. I felt it burn at me, eating away at my insides until my only options were to set it free or die. And so I freed it, and in freeing it, I freed myself. I began the process of becoming the person I had always known I was.

So I asked Ms. Rodas whether this coming out was like that for her: an escape from a prison of her own creation.

She smiled. She has a beautiful smile, with wrinkles in her cheeks and eyes that show that it comes out often.

“It wasn’t secrecy so much as privacy,” she said. “From a fairly young age, I learned that I didn’t get to have one without the other. When you live in the public eye, when all parts of your life are scrutinized for public consumption, it forces you to live for the public and not for yourself. We did that, once, and it nearly took my greatest happiness from me. I didn’t want to risk that again.”

So why come forward now? 

“It’s a matter of legacy. We’re lucky enough that we’ll be remembered long beyond our time, but the stories that are out there--the histories, the unauthorized biographies--none of them get it right. We’re going to have legacies, whether we want to or not. I’m an old woman now. It’s time to set the record straight.” She quirked her lips at me, then cocked an eyebrow, clearly proud of the joke she was about to make. “So to speak, anyway.”

You’re reading this in _Autostrider_ , so I assume you’ve inferred that Ms. Rodas is queer. The “we” refers to Ms. Rodas and her wife. They’ve been together for fifty-five years, and you’re going to care about her part of the story, too. Rodas didn’t sell us the story, and God knows she could have sold it to any one of a thousand other outlets for a hefty payout. She gifted it to us, she said, because she trusted us to tell it right.

So here’s the great secret of M.D. Rodas:  
  
Her name is Margarita Rodas, though she goes by Maggie. And while that name may mean nothing to you, you know her. You know the name she used to use, decades and decades ago.

Maggie Rodas, you see, is Maggie Sawyer.

You know Maggie Sawyer as one of the greatest Hollywood starlets of the 1940s and early 1950s, drawing favorable comparisons to Lucille Ball for her talents in comedy while still having the gravitas to lead such critically-acclaimed dramas as 1948’s _Leaving Paris_ and 1951’s _Bowsprit Waltz_. She was called to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955, and subsequently she was blacklisted. But unlike many blacklisted Hollywood A-listers who found their way back into the industry in the 60s and beyond, Sawyer retired into obscurity--or so we thought. 

A pause, here, to address the elephant in the room. This is not the first time someone has claimed to be M.D. Rodas. In 1987, the Oscar for best adapted screenplay was awarded to _Dovetail_ , which was based on Rodas’s 1974 novel of the same name and for which she has a screenwriting credit. Famously, she did not appear to collect her award, and her co-screenwriter, James Olsen, suggested in his speech that even he didn’t know the identity of the writer with whom he had collaborated by mail for three years. Stories circulated that Snapper Carr had tried to claim the award--and, by extension, the Rodas identity--backstage later that night, only to be sued by Rodas’s attorneys. Many have theorized that Rodas’s style, which is more literary than most of its genre, suggests that the name might belong to one of the great literary novelists who wrote crime fiction for fun on the side; perhaps Ian McEwen or Margaret Atwood had come up with the name to avoid tarnishing their brand. The most widespread rumor has always been that Rodas was yet another pen name for Ed McBain, who has published under at least five other known pseudonyms. 

So let me make one thing clear: I did not take Ms. Rodas’s assertions at face value. This story is fully, heavily fact-checked, not only from my own due diligence but through independent review arranged by the _Autostrider_ editorial team. I have seen the early typewritten manuscript drafts of several of Rodas’s books, marked up with suggestions that helped to transform those early drafts into the books we know and love. I have spoken to people she mentions from her past. I have spoken to her literary agent. I have laid eyes on contracts and signatures. I have even seen the statuette for the screenwriting Oscar.

This story, this article, is the truth.

I met Ms. Rodas at her home in the Presidio. Its 1960s architecture blends in with the rest of the area; walking by, you’d never know that one of the most prolific and best-selling authors of the last fifty years lived there. Inside, though, it’s beautifully maintained, with tall windows and mid-century modern furnishings turned toward a view of the bay. She welcomed me at the door herself--no publicist, no buffer. She just smiled like an old friend, and invited me in. Then she asked, almost apologetically, if I would mind sitting with her in the living room, because even the light chill of the day was a bit too much for her to sit outside.

“These old bones,” she said. “They’ve forgotten everything about where they came from.”

Nebraska, by the way. She was born in Nebraska, and was once hardened to its winters.

She is smaller than you’d think from her movie roles, and her long grey hair is streaked with black, not the platinum blonde she was known for in her cinema heyday.

I’m a fashion junkie. I admit it: I asked her about the hair.

She laughed, clearly good-natured about it, though her explanation left me feeling anything but good-natured about the way Hollywood treated her.

“Things were different in those days,” she said. “My first producer said my face was pretty enough for top billing, but the black hair made me look too foreign. I couldn’t push back, you know, I was just barely fifteen and he’d have kicked me to the curb. So I bleached it for fifteen years. But as soon as I left Hollywood, I went back to black. It was starting to fall out. I couldn’t have kept that up forever.”

Is that why she never went back to Hollywood, even when they started re-hiring blacklisters?

She looked at me for longer than I expected for a question that I’d thought was a throwaway. And then, finally, she said, “Hair is hair. I didn’t mind going blonde, it wasn’t a bad look for me. But thinking back now, it almost feels symbolic. I was going bald for them. I was contorting myself into what they wanted me to be, and I was doing it at my own expense. And by the time people got over the blacklist, I was too old for most Hollywood roles, and I had a new career that was thriving, and I’d achieved it without having to contort myself at all. Quite the opposite, really: I was living more freely, and more happily, than I had ever imagined I could live.”

When the first M.D. Rodas novel was published in 1962, nobody drew the connection to Maggie Sawyer’s birth name, Margarita Rodas. For one thing, that birth name wasn’t widely known at that time; unless you had connections to the Fox studios publicity department who coined her stage name, you would really have had no way to find out what Maggie Sawyer had been called before she came to Hollywood. And even if you’d known Maggie’s full birth name, the “D” doesn’t fit. The name on her birth certificate is Margarita Elena Rodas Molina. 

That D, it turns out, unlocks a whole second branch of her story.

“We weren’t married in 1962,” Rodas said. “We never dreamed we would ever be able to be married. So when I began publishing my books, that D was my little way of incorporating her name into mine. It was a secret act of joining us.”

The D, you see, is for Danvers. Rodas’s wife is Alexandra Danvers, a general practitioner well-known in San Francisco’s Castro district for providing LGBT-friendly health care from the mid-1960s until she retired in 1995 at the age of 70.

(And, yes, Danvers is also the namesake for Alexandra Morse, the lead detective in all of Rodas’s books.)

When I arrived for my interview, Ms. Danvers was there, too. She brought us each a cup of tea from the kitchen, carried in one mug at a time because she walks with a cane. She is taller than Rodas, with snow-white hair styled into a modern, carefully-disheveled pixie cut. Where Rodas is all smiles and soft welcome, everything about Danvers is old-school glamour and class.

She and Rodas sat next to each other on the sofa, close enough for their knees to touch. They touched each other a lot, their fingertips glancing off each other’s knees whenever they made an important point or wanted to remind each other of something. I was happy to have Danvers there. As soon as I saw her, I knew that my invitation to interview M.D. Rodas had been a cover for the story they wanted me to tell about both of them.

Danvers, too, has a past life, and the fact that it was never drawn into the public is a testament to how well, and how thoroughly, queer people can manage secrets, especially when it comes to protecting their own. And Danvers did what she could to repay that respect for her secrecy, caring and advocating for AIDS patients through the worst of that crisis in the late 80s, and offering transition support for trans patients to the extent that the law allowed.

“Of course they knew who I was,” Danvers told me. “But they knew that if they drew attention to me, they’d be drawing attention to all of us. So they kept it quiet.”

Here’s the secrecy she, and her patients, protected: Alexandra Danvers is Alexis D’Anvers, also a Hollywood star of the forties and fifties known for her post-war romantic and dramatic leads.

Unlike Rodas, Danvers was never blacklisted, but she left Hollywood not long after Rodas did. Rodas’s last film as Maggie Sawyer was _Lovesick Crumpet_ , a comedy filmed in 1955 but that was barred from cinematic release after her blacklisting; it was published on VHS in the 1980s. Danvers’ last film as Alexis D’Anvers was 1957’s _Red Sky at Night_ , a cold war thriller that received strong reviews despite, not because of, her performance.

“Mentally, I was done before we started our first table read,” Danvers admitted to me. “I was finished with all of it. With Hollywood, with acting. I do regret how poor my performance was in that film. It wasn’t professional, and it’s not the way I wish I’d gone out. But the reality is that I was only there to fulfill my contract obligation.” 

I had to ask: did you leave Hollywood to follow Maggie?

“Absolutely. One hundred percent.” Then she paused, looking up, thinking. Rodas put a hand on her knee, quietly patient, waiting. 

“That’s not quite right,” Danvers finally said. “I wouldn’t have left if it weren’t for her, that’s true. But being with her, loving her not just through the blacklisting, but before it, showed me all these ugly dimensions of Hollywood life that I found I couldn’t abide. I left with her because I loved her. But even if she’d stopped me from following her, I think I would have left Hollywood. Once I’d seen the darkness, it drowned out the light.”

Rodas smiled at her, and then leaned over and kissed her on the shoulder.

My heart nearly exploded.

Love is real.

And on that note: of course, I asked about their wedding.

Always ask happy elderly couples to tell you about their weddings. It’s the best.

Sure enough, Rodas pulled out a photo album.

“We were married twice,” she said. “We had a religious ceremony with a civil union in 2000, and then a civil marriage ceremony in 2008 before Prop 8 passed.”

Here's one of the photos. It's from the one from the ceremony in 2000. I’ve saved it to my phone. It makes me _that_ happy.

[Alt text: Photograph of Maggie Rodas and Alexandra Danvers holding hands under a chuppah, leaning toward each other, laughing. Alexandra is wearing a mauve dress, Maggie is wearing a light grey pantsuit. To one side stands a tall, regal-looking woman in her eighties and a handsome African-American man of about the same age, holding hands. On the other side stand two elderly women, each holding flowers; one is African-American wearing a beautiful light-blue dress, the other appears white and has masculine features, wearing a three-piece suit.]

“It was a bit of a process,” Danvers said, laughing. “I wanted to have a Jewish wedding. That wasn’t something I was willing to compromise on. And the rabbi said he was happy to perform same-sex weddings for Jewish couples, but only if both were Jewish. So Maggie had to convert.”

Rodas just shrugged. “Look at how beautiful that chuppah is. The moment I saw it, the moment I imagined her under it… it was a really easy decision.” 

How’s your Hebrew, Ms. Rodas?

“Oh, God. Don’t ask me that!” 

The second wedding was a courthouse service shortly before the passage of Proposition 8.

“We knew it was going to be challenged,” Rodas said, “so we didn’t mess around.”

Danvers nodded. She took Maggie’s hand without looking. They knew where to find each other in space.

“When you’re our age,” Danvers said, “you really have to think about your inheritance, and what you’re leaving behind for the other person. We bought this house in my name, but for most of our lives together, Maggie provided our income and managed our retirement accounts. I mean, we left Hollywood and I spent the next nine years in school before doing my residency, and then I opened up a non-profit clinic. I was rich as royalty when we left LA, but I’ve barely made a penny since then!”

“Neither of us wants to dismiss how fortunate we’ve been,” Rodas added. “We have never struggled financially and our worst-case scenario is a thousand times better than most people’s best-case scenario. But I’d have had to sell this house, our home since 1962, to pay the inheritance taxes on it. Alex would have had to pay tens or hundreds of thousands in bond and contract fees to pay inheritance tax on my savings.” She teared up a little, the whites of her eyes turning red. “Everything was always ours,” she said. “As we got older, and the law failed and failed to recognize that, well, of course you start to worry about the worst. It’s bad enough to leave the other person alone, but can you imagine leaving them with debt? Can you imagine losing your spouse and your home in the same fell swoop?”

I can, I said. I think every queer person has imagined that.

“Well, not anymore, I hope.” Danvers smiled. She pointed to the two women standing by them in the wedding photo. "These are our dearest friends. We went together to get married, in 2008. They had their ceremony, and then we had ours right after with the same judge. Then we went out for dinner, and it was a strange, bittersweet evening, because we felt like we should be happy, but instead we were afraid of what we knew we might lose." She pointed to the more masculine woman. "She was the one who stayed optimistic. She said, 'the future will catch up to the truth.' And, you know, she was right. It always does. It’s coming.”

The future will catch up to the truth.

I sat with that line for a moment, unable to decide whether it was bad fortune-cookie wisdom or whether there might really be weight to it. Danvers, it turns out, still has excellent vision, because she caught my skepticism right away.

“Do you know the difference between a secret and a lie?” she asked.

I thought about it for a moment and then said, “One is a protection of private information, and the other is a crafting of falsehood?”

“But don’t we craft falsehoods to protect private information?” She finished her tea and then leaned forward, setting her cup on the table and gazing at me with a sudden, deep intensity. “Here’s the difference: secrets are the stories we keep to ourselves because the world can’t bear them. Lies are the stories we tell other people because the world can’t bear us. Secrets are for you. Lies are for them. Now: do you know what secrets and lies have in common?”

“They’re both stories we tell?” I hazarded.

“They’re both built around the truth,” she said. “You can have truth without secrets, and truth without lies, but you can’t have lies and secrets without the truth they conceal. That’s why the truth is stronger. That’s why the truth will prevail.” 

She smiled. Her eyes were dark, and piercing, and somehow warm and welcoming and terrifying and intimidating all at once, and I found myself overwhelmed by them.

Rodas noticed. She moved a hand to Danvers’s back, rubbing a circle there, and Danvers sat up again, softening like she was slipping out of a trance.

Rodas smiled at me, conspiratorial, managing to convey _don’t mind her, she gets like this,_ by the expression of her eyes alone.

“So,” I asked, as my racing heart calmed, “What was M.D. Rodas? A secret or a lie?”

“M.D. Rodas was a lie we told to protect our secret,” Rodas answered, and Danvers didn’t disagree. “We learned long ago that it’s better to tell our own lies than to have other people bastardize our truth.”

They told me a remarkable story, then, about 1954. About an exposé in a tabloid called _Confidential_ that speculated that Alexis D’Anvers and Maggie Sawyer might have been sexually involved. 

“The truth is, I don’t know if they really believed it,” Rodas said, laughing. “They got all the details wrong. The story was a travesty, a pile of lies built around an unlikely, impossible truth that only we knew was there. And that pile of lies over that rock of truth, well, it almost crushed us.”

Danvers’s eyes watered then, reddening, nothing at all like the fierce, impassioned maven I had seen just a moment earlier.

She looked at Rodas the way I’ve always wanted someone to look at me. The way we all want someone to look at us.

“It feels so long ago, now,” Danvers said. “So small, compared to all the time we’ve had. But it was the hardest year of my life, that year, learning how to separate my secrets from my lies.”

So what will you do with this new truth? What will you do now that M.D. Rodas is out of the closet?

Rodas laughed, breaking the moment of tension. When I walked away from this interview, the sound of her laugh echoed in my head; I’d heard it so often. She laughs so easily.

She wrapped Danvers’s hand in both of hers. “I want to walk a red carpet,” she said. “I walked dozens, maybe hundreds of them when I was young, and so did Alex, but always with--what do you call them? The men lesbians take on dates?” 

“Beards?”

“Right! Beards!” She laughed again. “We always went with beards. When _Follow Her_ comes out next month, I want us to get dressed up in couture, I want to hire the stylist and rent the limo, and I want to walk one more red carpet.”

She looked over at Danvers, who was already looking at her, a gleam in her eyes telling the story of a lifetime of love, of companionship, of commitment.

Their hands tightened on each other, and when Rodas looked at me, her eyes were bright and young, like she’d suddenly lost fifty years. “I want to be photographed holding her hand.”

_\--_

_Follow Her_ is produced by Universal Pictures, directed by Kathryn Bigelow and starring Ming-Na Wen. It premieres next month at the Toronto International Film Festival.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Maggie has, of course, written a memoir of her life with Alex, which will not be published until after their deaths because it talks about how Alex provided trans healthcare outside of strictly legal channels starting in the 1970s, and how they were regular donors to various queer activist orgs.
> 
> 1\. I was inspired to write this after reading (well, listening to) Taylor Jenkins Reid's "The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo" early in my COVID quarantine. It was fantastic; highly recommend. The image of Maggie with blonde hair was inspired by Evelyn Hugo's blonde hair in that book.
> 
> 2\. If it weren't for [Apparitionism's fic "Studio,"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1730693) I may never have known that Confidential Magazine existed. If you enjoy reading stories about queer women in early Hollywood, I honestly can't recommend that one enough. It's fic, but it's the kind of incredibly well-written, well-told, well-researched story that you can enjoy on its own merits without knowing or caring about the fandom it's written for.
> 
> 3\. Both of these -- the book, and the fic -- have elements of media commentary like the one I've written for this epilogue. "Seven Husbands" uses, as a framing device, a journalist's invitation to interview Hugo. "Studio" includes an epilogue written in the form of an excerpt from a scholarly book that reflects on the characters. I don't know if I was consciously inspired by either of them to write this epilogue in this format, but I'm sure they informed me on some level, so. Hat-tip to both.
> 
> -Roadie


End file.
